Table of Contents

Why meaningness?
An appetizer: purpose
Preview: eternalism and nihilism
What is meaningness?
Misunderstanding meaningness makes many miserable
Stances: responses to meaningness
Stances trump systems
Stances are unstable
Nebulosity
Pattern
Fixation and denial
Confused stances come in pairs
No middle way
Accepting nebulosity resolves confusions about meaning
Not a general dialectic
Confusion, completion, misery and joy
Meaningness as a liberating practice
The psychological anatomy of a stance
Adopting, committing, accomplishing, wavering, appropriating
Doing meaning better
The Big Three stance combinations
Schematic overview: all dimensions
Meaning and meaninglessness
The puzzle of meaningness
Meaningfulness and meaninglessness
Extreme examples, eternalism and nihilism
So how does meaningness work?
Schematic overview: meaningness
Eternalism: the fixation of meaning
I get duped by eternalism in a casino
The appeal of eternalism
The promise of certainty
The illusion of understanding
The fantasy of control
The wheel of fortune
Eternalism as the only salvation from nihilism
Eternalism is harmful
Eternalist ploys and their antidotes
Imposing fixed meanings
Smearing meaning all over everything
Magical thinking
Hope
Pretending
Colluding for eternalism
Hiding from nebulosity
Kitsch and naïveté
Armed & armored eternalism
Faith
Thought suppression
Bargaining and recommitment
Wistful certainty
Faithful bafflement
Mystification
Rehearsing the horrors of nihilism
Purification
Fortress eternalism
Accomplishing eternalism
Exiting eternalism
Non-theistic eternalism
Atheism: a good first step
Belief in belief
How space aliens make everything meaningful
Rationalist ideologies as eternalism
Wrong-way reductions
Eternalisms as wrong-way reductions
Logic as eternalism
The continuum gambit
Bayesianism is an eternalism
Probability theory does not extend logic
Utilitiarianism is an eternalism
Perfection Salad
Nutrition offers its resignation. And the reply
Nutrition: the Emperor has no clothes
A malign modern myth of meaningness: cognitive “science”
Eternalism in politics
Nihilism: the denial of meaning
You’ve got nihilism wrong
Rumcake and rainbows
Cold comfort: the false promise of nihilism
The nihilist elite
Nihilism is hard
190-proof vs. lite nihilism
Spam from God
The emotional dynamics of nihilism
Nihilistic rage
Nihlistic intellectualization
Nihilistic depression
Nihilistic anxiety
Sartre’s ghost and the corpse of God
Meaningness: the complete stance
No cosmic plan
Unity and diversity
Schematic overview: unity and diversity
Monism and dualism contain each other
Boundaries, objects, and connections
Non-existence: Scarlet Leviathan
Monism: the denial of difference
Critiques of monism
The dualist critique of monism
The nihilist critique of monism
The complete stance’s critique of monism
Dualism: the fixation of difference
Participation
Selfness
Schematic overview: self
A billion tiny spooks
The true self
Selflessness
Intermittently continuing
Neither objective nor subjective
Purpose
Schematic overview: purpose
Mission
Materialism
Mission and materialism mingled
Enjoyable usefulness
Personal value
Schematic overview: value
Specialness
Ordinariness
Nobility
Capability
Schematic overview: capability
Total responsibility
Victim-think
Light-heartedness
Ethics: a new beginning
Schematic overview: ethics
Ethical eternalism
Ethical nihilism
Ethical responsiveness
Authority
Schematic overview: authority
Reasonable respectability
Romantic rebellion
Freedom
Sacredness
Schematic overview: sacredness
Religiosity
Secularism
Kadag
Contingency
Schematic overview: contingency
Causality
Chaos
Flow
Meaningness and Time: past, present, future
How meaning fell apart
A gigantic chart that explains absolutely everything
In praise of choicelessness
The glory of systems
Invented traditions and timeworn futures
Systems of meaning all in flames
The collapse of rational certainty
Countercultures: modernity’s last gasp
What makes a counterculture?
Hippies and Evangelicals: monist and dualist countercultures
The hippie family who invented contemporary conservatism
Renegotiating self and society
Rejecting rationality, reinventing religion, reconfiguring the self
The personal is political
Rotating politics ninety degrees clockwise
Countercultures: modern mythologies
Fundamentalism is countercultural modernism
Counter-cultures: thick and wide
Why both countercultures failed
Wreckage: the culture war
Completing the countercultures
Subcultures: the diversity of meaning
Subcultures: meanings at play
Archipelago: subcultural politics
Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution
Atomization: the kaleidoscope of meaning
Not a good decade for thinking
Fluidity: a preview
Modes of meaningness, eternalism and nihilism
Desiderata for any future mode of meaningness
Sailing the seas of meaningness
Fluid understanding: meta-rationality
In the cells of the eggplant
Because rationality matters
The function and structure of the eggplant
Introducing key terms
Ontological remodeling
Fluid self in relationship
Fluid society
Fluid culture: metamodernism
Appendix: Glossary
Appendix: Further reading
Appendix: Terminological choices
Terminology: Complete
Terminology: Emptiness and form, nebulosity and pattern
Terminology: Non-dual

Why meaningness?

This web page is the first in an introductory section that explains what meaningness is, and why you might want to read a book about it.

Every page in the book has a navigation box at the bottom. In this one, you can see the several web pages that make up the introduction.

You might like to read the “general explanation” in the navigation box now, too. Then you can go on to the next page.

An appetizer: purpose

An appetizer: purpose

Let’s start this book in the middle. The main course is a ways off, and I want to give you a taste now.

Let’s talk about purpose. (Purpose is one of the dimensions of meaningness discussed in this book.)

Especially at turning points in life, people ask questions like:

  • Is there any purpose at all in living? Or is everything completely pointless?
  • What am I supposed to do?
  • How can I choose among the many ways I could spend the rest of my life?
  • Does everyone’s life have the same purpose, or does everyone have their own?
  • Where does purpose come from? Does it have some ultimate source, or is it just a personal invention?

Various religions, philosophies, and systems claim to have answers. Some are complicated, and they all seem quite different. When you strip away the details, though, there are only a half dozen fundamental answers. Each is appealing in its own way, but also problematic. Understanding clearly what is right and wrong about each approach can resolve the underlying problem.

Let’s go through these alternatives briefly. I will explain each one in detail in the middle part of the book.

Five confused attitudes to purpose

Everything has a fixed purpose, given by some sort of fundamental ordering principle of the universe. (This might be God, or Fate, or the Cosmic Plan, or something.) Humans too have a specific role to play in the proper order of the universe.

This is the stance of eternalism. It may be comfortable. If you just follow the eternal law, everything will come out right. Unfortunately, it often seems that much of life has no purpose. At any rate, you cannot figure out what it is supposed to be. Priests or other authority figures claim to know what the cosmic purposes are, but their advice often seems wrong for particular situations.

For these reasons, even people who are explicitly committed to eternalism generally fall into other stances at times.

Nothing has any purpose. Life is meaningless. Any purposes you imagine you have are illusions, errors, or lies.

This is the stance of nihilism. It appears quite logical. It might seem to follow naturally from some scientific facts: everything is made of subatomic particles; they certainly don’t have purposes; and you can’t get purpose by glomming together a bunch of purposeless bits.

It is easy to fall into nihilism in moments of despair; but, fortunately, it is difficult to maintain, and hardly anyone holds it for long. Nevertheless, the seemingly compelling logic of nihilism needs an answer. It turns out that it is quite wrong, as a matter again of science and logic. But because that is not obvious, three other stances try (and fail) to find a middle way between eternalism and nihilism.

The supposed cosmic purposes are doubtful at best, but obviously, people do have goals. There are human purposes no one can seriously doubt: survival, health, sex, romance, fame, power, enjoyable experiences, children, beautiful things. Realistically, those are what everyone pursues anyway. You might as well drop the hypocritical pretense of “higher” purposes and go for what you really want.

This is the stance of materialism. Realistically, most people adopt this stance much of the time. However, at times everyone does recognize the value of altruistic and creative purposes, which this stance rejects. Moreover, most recognize that materialism is an endless treadmill: the enjoyment of new goodies wears off quickly, and then you are left craving the next, better thing.

You can’t take it with you. After you are dead, it is meaningless how many toys you had. What matters is how you live your life: whether you create something of beauty or value for others. You have unique capabilities to improve the world, and it’s your responsibility to find and act on your personal gift.

This is the stance of mission. The problem is that no one actually has a “unique personal gift.” God does not have plans for us. People waste a lot of time and effort trying to find “their purpose in life,” and are miserable when they fail. Besides that, rejecting material purposes causes you to overlook genuine opportunities for enjoyment and satisfaction.

Since the universe (or God) does not supply us with purposes, they are human creations. Mostly people mindlessly adopt purposes that are handed to them by society. You need to throw those off, and choose your own purposes, as an act of creative will.

This is the stance of existentialism.1 It is based on the assumption that if purposes are not objective, or externally given, they must be subjective, or internally created. Existentialism holds out hope for freedom. But it is not actually possible to create your own purposes. Choosing at random would be pointless, and impossible; and what purely personal basis could you have for choosing one purpose over another?

Resolving confusion

Each of these confused stances treats meaning as fixed by an external force, or denies meaning or some aspect of it.

The central message of this book is that meaning is real (and cannot be denied), but is fluid (so it cannot be fixed). It is neither objective (given by God) nor subjective (chosen by individuals).

The book offers resolutions to problems of meaning that avoid denial, fixation, and the impossibility of total self-determination. These resolutions are non-obvious, and sometimes unattractive; but they are workable in ways the alternatives are not.

  • 1. Actually, it is more-or-less what existentialists called “authenticity.” Using that term would be confusing, because existentialist “authenticity” hasn’t got all that much to do with the everyday sense of the word.

Preview: eternalism and nihilism

Eternalism and nihilism are the simplest, and most extreme, stances toward meaningness.

  • Eternalism says that everything has a definite, true meaning.
  • Nihilism says that nothing really means anything.

Both these stances are wrong, factually. They are also unworkable, in their implications for living.

However, almost everyone falls into them at times, triggered by particular contexts. Each stance is based on genuine insights, and a powerful, emotionally appealing pattern of thinking. They also can seem to be the only possible alternatives, so we are forced into one by the repulsive qualities of the other.

Understanding the logic of eternalism and nihilism, and the resolution of the fundamental problem they address, is key to unlocking the material covered in this book. Because they are simple and extreme, the logic of these two stances is particularly clear. The other confused stances arise mainly as failing attempts to find some compromise between them.

This page is a brief introduction to eternalism, nihilism, and the third possibility that resolves them. I cover the same topics in much greater detail later in the book.

Eternalism and its discontents

Kitschy eternalism easily turns to vengeful self-righteousness

Eternalism and nihilism are both responses to the ambiguity of meaningness. In personal experience, meanings seem to resist focus, shift, and come and go. Moreover, people disagree about what things mean. Perhaps meanings are just a matter of opinion? Meaning is important enough that this uncertainty is emotionally unacceptable.

The strategy of eternalism is to deny the ambiguity. Despite appearances, it says, everything does have a clear and definite meaning, which is not merely subjective. We might not perceive it, or we might mistake it, but it exists.

If meanings are objective, not human creations, it may seem they must come from some ultimate, transcendent source. In many systems, that is a God. In others, it is an abstraction, like Fate or Reason or the Absolute. These are supposed to provide the sole source of meaning, purpose, value, and ethics. I refer to any such source as an eternal ordering principle or Cosmic Plan.

Luckily, there is no eternal ordering principle, so eternalism is false as a fact-claim. Arguments about that never seem to persuade anyone, however. So I take this hyper-atheism for granted, and instead ask: what are our options if eternalism is wrong?

Here it is helpful to understand what works, and doesn’t work, about eternalism (and the other confused stances) emotionally, rather than in terms of truth.

The appeal of eternalism is that questions of life-purpose and ethics have clear, simple answers. If you act in accordance with this Cosmic Plan, you are guaranteed a good outcome. You can be assured that seeming chaos and senseless misery are all orderly parts of the will of an all-good principle.

Even if it were factually true, eternalism could not deliver on this sales pitch. The compelling emotional logic breaks down in some contexts. In those situations, adopting the eternalist stance makes you think and act in ways that lead to big trouble.

It is difficult to see how the suffering caused by earthquakes could be willed by a benevolent God, or meaningful, or anything other than disasters that just happened. The difficulty of maintaining willful blindness to meaninglessness is an obstacle to eternalism. It is hard not to fall into the confused stance that most things are God’s will, but not the bad bits. Once you admit that some things are meaningless, the logic of eternalism starts to fall apart.

To defend against that, you have to hallucinate a pastel-colored Disneyfied world in which everything works out for the best in the end, there is a silver lining in every cloud, everyone is beautiful inside, and all the world needs is love.

Threats to this vision must be destroyed. Eternalist kitsch rapidly switches to self-righteous vengeance when contradicted.

Eternalism also requires you to submit to the Cosmic Plan, to do as it demands, rather than pursuing your own goals. It is often unclear what God wants you to do, and sometimes what he wants is insane and harmful. Then you either do the apparently right thing, which erodes your commitment to his ethical code, or you follow the prescription. If that has the expected bad result, you must blind yourself to that, and harden yourself against the temptation to weaken the code to fit reality.

Much good is left undone because eternalism did not recommend it, and much harm is done in its name. We also lose the freedom of courage: the freedom to risk, to take actions whose results we cannot predict. Armored eternalism condemns such creativity.

Nihilism and its discontents

Nihilism comes out red and black: rage and depression
Official nihilist flag

Nihilism starts from the intelligent recognition that eternalism is false and unworkable. Most events are meaningless; meaning is not objective; there is no Cosmic Plan.

Nihilism then simply inverts the core claim of eternalism: it says everything is really meaningless. Seeming meanings are illusory or arbitrary or subjective, and therefore unreal or unimportant.

This stance is unworkable. Meaning is obvious everywhere, and it takes elaborate intellectualization to explain it away. Attempting to live without significance, purpose, or value leads to rage, anguish, alienation, depression, and exhaustion.

Kitsch is worthy of contempt, but—through fear of being duped again—we extend contempt beyond kitsch to anything that affirms meaning. This makes defiant nihilism actively hostile to more-or-less everything, but particularly beauty, virtue, kindness, and whatever else makes life worth living.

Eternalism blinds us by a simple effort of will, or faith. Such simple stupidity is insufficient for nihilism: it is not possible to use mere force to fool ourselves that there is no meaning in the world. Instead, nihilism uses intelligence against itself to produce stupidity. Somehow meaning must be explained away by intellectual sleight-of-hand. A theory is needed that can distract us from the obvious. This theory has to get complicated quickly in order to be sufficiently confusing, or so brilliantly insightful as to dazzle us into submission. This intellectual stupidity masquerades as intelligence.

Denying meaning blinds one to beauty, making all reality dull gray. Denying purpose produces paralysis, with no possibility of choice and so no action. Denying significance suggests that there is no urgency to do anything about it.

In depression, you recoil from the overwhelming vastness and complexity of reality. You feel lost in space. You put yourself in a box to create comforting limits. Nihilism shuts down emotions to deny passion.

A false dichotomy, and failing compromises

When in the eternalist stance, it may seem that the only alternative is nihilism, and vice versa. Because each has obvious dire faults, we adopt whichever seems less bad in a particular situation. Because one looks worse, we try to stabilize ourselves in the other, declaring allegiance to it and viewing the opposite as the enemy. But this is impossible. Instead, we often squirm back and forth between the two in a sneaky, panicked way. It’s common for people to switch between eternalism and nihilism repeatedly in the space of a few minutes. Once you start to see this pattern, and catch yourself doing it, it becomes funny.

An alternate strategy is to try to find a compromise. Without thinking about it carefully, we suppose that the world is somewhat governed by an eternal organizing principle (even if we are staunch atheists), and that the world is also somewhat horribly meaningless (even if we are committed eternalists). Some things, we suppose, have definite meaning, and others are definitely meaningless.

The various “confused stances” discussed later in this book arise in this way. Each is a bargain in which we reluctantly acknowledge meaninglessness in some parts of life, deny it in others, and try to get the world to accept that. But it doesn’t; so every compromise causes new trouble, and fails.

The wrong idea underlying all confused stances is that things must be either definitely meaningful or else effectively meaningless. Or, if meaning is not objective, it must be subjective. But these are not the only possibilities.

Completion: meaningness

The complete stance of meaningness resolves the problems of eternalism and nihilism

I have coined the word “meaningness” to express the ambiguous quality of meaningfulness and meaninglessness that we encounter in practice. According to the stance that recognizes meaningness, meaning is real but not definite. It is neither objective nor subjective. It is neither given by an external force nor a human invention.

I call this a “complete stance” because it acknowledges two qualities: nebulosity or indefiniteness, and pattern or regularity. A complete stance does not deny any aspect of meaningness.

From point of view of the complete stance, eternalism and nihilism are each half right. Eternalism rightly recognizes that the world is meaningful to us, and that it must be accepted as it is. This is the acknowledgement of pattern: the world in all its variety, pain and pleasure alike. Nihilism rightly recognizes that there is no eternal source of meaning, so there is no ultimate basis or necessity for rejecting anything. This is the acceptance of nebulosity: the chaos and contingency of the world, and the recognition that we are free from divine law.

What is meaningness?

Diogenes of Sinope by Jean-Léon Gérôme

This book is about meaningness. “Meaningness” is a word I invented, referring to the quality of being meaningful and/or meaningless.

The word “meaning” has two quite different meanings in English. It can refer to the meaning of symbols, such as words and road signs. This book is not about that kind of meaning.

People also speak of “the meaning of life.” That is the sort of meaningness this book is about. So I apply “meaningness” only to the sorts of things one could describe as “deeply meaningful” or “pretty meaningless.” The book is about matters such as purpose, ethics, and selfhood.

Meaningness is a quality, not a thing. I don’t think there is a definite meaning of life. Meaningness is always nebulous: indefinite, uncertain, ambiguous.

The suffix -ness constantly reminds one of this nebulosity. I mostly avoid the word “meaning,” because it builds in the assumption that something meaningful has one specific meaning. Often, that is wrong.

I use “meaningness” in three closely-related ways, referring to:

It should be clear from context which way I’m using the word in each case.

A curiously missing word

I invented the word “meaningness” because the topic of this book seemed to have no name. There seems to be no -ology or -osophy devoted to it.

There are various -ologies devoted to meanings. For example, semantics studies the meanings of words. This book is not about that.

The various dimensions of meaningness are discussed in religion and philosophy; but, strangely, the topic as a whole is never addressed.

Neither religion nor philosophy

My approach in this book is non-religious and non-philosophical. It is meant for readers who have rejected religious answers. Those who have figured out that philosophy also lacks answers may be even more intrigued.

It will be obvious that the book is non-religious. It’s anti-religious to the extent that most religions are eternalist, and rejection of eternalism is one of my main themes. I take atheism as a given; it’s barely worth mentioning, much less arguing for.

Less obviously, the book is also non-philosophical, and perhaps even anti-philosophical. It is meant as a practical manual. I hope it is useful to anyone who struggles with questions like “what should I do with my life?” and “how ethical should I be?” and “do I have a special destiny, or is my life going to have no meaning beyond the ordinary?”

Isn’t it odd that philosophy has no branch devoted to meaningness? Especially since meaningness is exactly what regular people, who haven’t studied philosophy, usually think philosophy is about?

In ancient times, philosophers did ask the big questions of meaningness. (I’m fond of Diogenes, whose picture heads this page.) Nowadays, big questions are considered embarrassingly naive. The proper job of a philosopher is to make tiny technical corrections in esoteric theories that probably have no connection with reality.

In recent philosophical history, existentialism was an exception. It was willing to ask the important questions. It avoided the error of eternalism, by rejecting definite, objective meanings. However, it wrongly supposed that meaningness is merely subjective, and thereby came to an acknowledged nihilistic dead end.

Particular branches of current philosophy address particular dimensions of meaningness. For instance, normative moral philosophy tries to answer some questions about ethics—one dimension of meaningness. Later in the book, I argue that nearly all current ethical theories are either eternalist or nihilist, and therefore wrong. The wrong answers come from asking wrong questions. I will suggest better questions, and beginnings of answers.

Misunderstanding meaningness makes many miserable

Existential suffering

I was inspired to write this book when I saw many of my friends struggling with the question “what is my true purpose in life?”

This struggle makes you miserable. Finding your “true mission” is difficult. It might seem that it ought to be obvious, but my friends seemed to fail repeatedly. There is no pragmatic, straightforward means to discover your mission; you need to use non-ordinary techniques, such as psychotherapy, divination, or dream work. At times they would be excited because they had finally found it—but a month or two later, they realized they had been mistaken. What they had thought was their true mission turned out not to be. Then they would lapse into depression, for months or years, during which they seemed to do nothing much—just surviving. Of course, they said, since they didn’t know what they were supposed to be doing, it was not surprising that they weren’t accomplishing anything.

I think the reason you can’t find your mission in life is that there is no such thing. That answer seems unacceptable, though, if there is only one alternative: materialism.

If there is not something I was put on earth to do, perhaps all that’s left is to join the rat-race of accumulation and personal gratification? But everyone understands that is unsatisfying: a dead end. We have tried materialism, and seen that it fails. You can pursue money, sex, popularity, and power for a while, but either you find you can’t get enough, or it turns to cardboard in your mouth when you do.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Some people pursue mission relentlessly; others materialism. Most flip-flop. In any case, these alternatives both produce disappointment, depression, at times anguish.

This is an example of what we could call “existential suffering” or “spiritual suffering.” It is suffering due to one’s relationship with meaningness. Purpose is one dimension of meaningness.

I believe this kind of suffering is unnecessary. It is caused by wrong attitudes toward meaningness. Those can be replaced with accurate ones, and then you are freed from it.

Of course, most suffering is not existential, or spiritual. Most suffering is practical: concrete circumstances are unsatisfactory. I haven’t got much to say about practical suffering, except that it often has practical solutions. Spiritual suffering is eradicated by replacing supposedly-spiritual problems (like “what is my life purpose?”) with practical ones—which you may be able to make progress on.

Mission and materialism are not the only possibilities. You can, instead, do things that you enjoy and that are useful to others.

“But how do I know what to dedicate my life to?” Wrong question… a good question to ask instead is “What is something I can do now that will be both enjoyable and useful?” That’s a practical problem. You can find answers without using religious or therapeutic voodoo.

It’s an unattractive question, however. “What is my true mission in life?” promises that if only you can find the answer, and you throw your whole self into your mission, you will be a very special person. Along the way, you will have certainty, and when you die, you will die justified.

“What’s something useful and enjoyable I can do now?” prompts the answer “Who cares—so what?” Mere usefulness and enjoyability doesn’t sound good enough. This “complete stance”—of enjoyable usefulness—is emotionally unattractive at first. Once accepted, though, it does eliminate the anguish of an existential dilemma. If you can let go of the grandiosity that leads you to imagine that some special task awaits you, and the false hope that getting enough of what you want would make life satisfactory, you can be useful and enjoy yourself. That letting-go takes some doing; I will suggest ways to go about it.

This book addresses a series of dilemmas of this sort. I call them “dimensions of meaningness.” Each dimension has a limited number of possible approaches, or “stances.”

The commonly available confused stances are each unworkable, because they are based on misunderstandings of how meaning works. For example, it is easy to waste a huge amount of emotional energy trying to be special or ordinary; to while your life away in mindless conformity or unrealistic rebellion; to play the victim or fail when you attempt to take total responsibility for your world. Adopting those stances makes you miserable.

For each dimension, I suggest an uncommon, alternative stance that resolves the misunderstanding, and turns a spiritual problem into a practical one.

Stances: responses to meaningness

“Stances” are simple patterns of thinking and feeling about meaningness.

This part of the book explains what stances are and how they work in general.

The following part looks at many specific stances in detail.

Stances trump systems

Stances trump systems

Mostly, people think about thinking about meaning in terms of systems. (By “systems,” I mean religions, philosophies, political ideologies, psychological frameworks, and so on.) But I think that is not how we actually think about meaningness.

When I say “think about thinking about,” I mean that if you ask “How do you think about questions of meaning, value, purpose, or ethics,” the answer is something like “I’m a Christian / existentialist / progressive / Jungian.” Or more likely, nowadays when few people want to commit to a single system, they may mention several.

It seems to me that this is a mistake. In practice, when we actually need to make decisions, we do it mainly on the basis of stances, not systems.

Stances are simple, compelling patterns of thinking and feelings concerning meaningness. For example: “I’m an ordinary guy,” or “the only real purpose in life is to squeeze as much pleasure out of it as you can before you die,” or “good people follow the rules,” or “everyone is responsible for their personal reality.”

Whatever system, or systems, someone believes in, they probably often adopt stances that contradict it. For example, Christians, in everyday life, often act on the basis of materialism. (I have never been a Christian, but I know this by reading books by Christian pastors, who say this is a big problem.) Progressives also fall into materialism—another contradiction. Many professed Christians say that “all is one, really”—the stance of monism—which goes against the central teaching of Christianity.

Systems are big, complicated things with lots of details you are supposed to believe and do. Systems have salespeople, who argue passionately in their favor.

Stances are very simple, and don’t require any specific beliefs or practices. No one explicitly promotes them. You pick them up automatically from our cultural “thought soup.” They are the ways people talk about meaning in soap operas and cafes.

Confused stances are insidious, because they are unnoticed. Because no one argues for them, no one argues against them. They are memes, mental viruses that people propagate by talking, without awareness of them.

Systems can help stabilize particular stances. Christianity, for instance, tries to stabilize eternalism—the idea that everything has a definite meaning given by God. Its detailed ideology provides support for this idea. If you are Christian and wobbling out of eternalism, it provides things to say to yourself to counteract that.

This works only to a limited extent. The experience of Christians is that “everyone falls into temptation.” That is not only the temptation of unethical actions—more seriously, it is acting on the basis of stances that contradict the religion’s core teachings.

Stances are unstable

Unstable rock formation

Image courtesy Berkeley Robinson

In times of crisis, longing, or doubt, one is likely to express one’s feelings to friends somewhat like this:

A lot of the time I don’t know what I should be doing. I mean, regular life is pretty meaningless, isn’t it? I know I must have been put on earth for some reason. I’m an artist, really. I’m not one of those mindless drones who sleepwalks through life. I can see what’s real; that’s the artist’s job. Discover yourself, discover reality. But I’m not sure what my artistic medium is meant to be.

Life basically just sucks, mostly. It seems like there has to be a better way; we can’t be meant to be miserable all the time. There has to be some ultimate purpose to existence.

I guess I do believe in God. I mean, maybe not as some guy up in Heaven, but something way bigger than us. Stuff doesn’t just happen; there has to be a reason for things. I mean, ultimately, it’s all one, isn’t it? I guess you could say I’m spiritual, sort of, but not religious. Organized religion is stupid. It’s all phony niceness. Real life isn’t like that. People walk all over you if you are too nice. You have to look out for yourself.

A lot of the time I think, OK, I’ll do a regular job, I can fit in, I can make a steady salary instead of being a starving artist. I’ve done that, you know? But the corporate world is all rigged against you. You can’t get ahead. We should sweep that away and create a just society, one that works for real people, not the greedy CEOs and politicians. They are the ones making war and polluting the earth and stuff.

I want to make the world a better place. I think most people do. I’ve got some friends who are political, you know, trying to change things. But I don’t see that they are going to make any difference. And anyway, in the long run, what difference could it make? In a hundred years, we’re all dead, and no one’s going to care. Might as well live for the moment, you know!

Because the confused stances fail to match reality, they are all unstable. As mind-states, they come and go. We flip-flop between them.

The speaker in the monologue above goes through a dozen stances in the space of a minute or two: nihilism, mission, true self, specialness, eternalism, causality, monism, materialism, reasonable respectability, victim-think, romantic rebellion, and back to mission and materialism again. (You might like to re-read it and pick these out.)

This invented speech may be somewhat exaggerated; usually stances persist a little longer, and it would be unusual to get through so many in a single moan-session. (He sounds like he might have ingested some substance that makes mental states less stable.) But I have often listened sympathetically as a friend in crisis has gone through several contradictory stances in an hour or so.

Because we aren’t aware of stances at all, we don’t notice this happening. We don’t see how dramatically we contradict ourselves.

Once you are aware of relating to meaningness in terms of such stances, you can catch yourself (and your friends) sliding from one to another like this. The flip-flopping is often accompanied by anxiety, which can produce defiant negativity or fake sweetness. Those are one clue that you are caught up in a confused stance. Stances allied to nihilism come with defiant negativity, and those allied to eternalism make you sound like a Hallmark greeting card.

Each confused stance tends to lead to one of a small number of following stances. Each stance has a logic that fails as you pursue it. As that becomes obvious, there is a natural next thought that slides you into a following stance without noticing.

For example, in the stance of respectability, it makes sense to have an ordinary job and fit in. But this involves cutting off your creativity, which is unacceptable. Recognizing this, you may move to the stance of victim-think, if you feel coerced into conformity. That makes you angry, and you think of forcibly changing conditions, in an unrealistic way: the stance of romantic rebellion.

This instability is one reason stances trump systems. No matter how determined you are to stick to a system, the stances connected with it are likely to slide out from under you.

Later in the book, I discuss each of the stances in detail, and as part of that I look at the logic that can lead from each to others. That lets you anticipate the wrong moves your thinking is likely to make, and helps counter them.

The antidotes to this whole process are the complete stances. Unfortunately, they too are unstable. They are unstable not because they fail to fit reality, but because they don’t offer the emotional pay-offs the confused stances do.

Once one has decided that the confused stances are unworkable, and that the complete stances are accurate, one can work toward stabilizing the complete ones.

Also, one can work on further destabilizing the confused stances, so they do not persist. Simply recognizing them, and seeing the logic of how they flop from one to the next, is one way to do that.

Nebulosity

Clouds and fields: nebulosity and pattern

“Nebulosity” means “cloud-like-ness.” Meaningness is cloud-like. It is real, but impossible to completely pin down.

Nebulosity is the key to understanding confusions about meaningness. That is a central point of this book.

Cloud-like

“Nebulosity” refers to the intangible, transient, amorphous, non-separable, ambiguous nature of meaningness.1

  • From a distance, clouds can look solid; close-up they are mere fog, which can even be so thin it becomes invisible when you enter it.
  • If you watch a cloud for a few minutes, it may change shape and size, or evaporate into nothing. But it is impossible to find an exact moment at which it ceases to exist.
  • Clouds often have vague boundaries and no particular shape.
  • It can be impossible to say where one cloud ends and another begins; whether two bits of cloud are connected or not; or to count the number of clouds in a section of the sky.
  • It can be impossible to say even whether there is a cloud in a particular place, or not.

Meanings behave in these ways, too.

The nebulosity of meaningness

“Meaning” can apply to many things: words, art works, or “life,” for example. The meanings even of words can never be fully specified. To varying degrees, they are ambiguous. Art is more extensively indefinite. The matters that might be called “spiritual”—which are the main topics of this book—are still more nebulous.

Because “spiritual” concerns are so insubstantial, perhaps it would be useful to look first at the nebulosity of the meaning of an art work, such as a piece of instrumental music.

  • When you think of the piece as a whole, its meaningfulness can seem quite solid. But when listening to it, you cannot say “this bit means this, and that bit means that.” The meaning becomes thin and wispy, in a sense.
  • What an art work means can change over time. Some songs that were tremendously meaningful when I was fifteen seem quite meaningless now. The meaning of the religious carvings of the Rapanui people of Easter Island is mostly permanently lost.
  • It is very difficult to say anything about what instrumental music means—even when you are sure it is highly meaningful.
  • Music comes in separate pieces (such as songs), maybe with separate meanings. But life does not come in well-defined chunks. “Spiritual” meanings are not clearly separable; they flow or shade into each other.
  • Meaningfulness and meaninglessness also shade into each other. Meaningness has infinite gradations of intangibility. It can be impossible to say whether something has meaning or not.

People often disagree about meanings. This can be because one person is right and the other wrong. However, often the difficulty is not that we don’t know what the true meaning is, but that it is inherently ambiguous.2 It is a feature of reality, not of knowledge. As we will see later, meaningness is not objective—but it is not subjective, either.

Nebulosity is unwelcome

The nebulosity of meaningness causes various problems: practical, social, and psychological. (Much of this book describes such problems.) Often, people would like to get rid of nebulosity, or pretend that it is not there.

Confused stances are attitudes to meaningness that refuse to acknowledge nebulosity. One strategy is to fixate meanings, attempting to deny their nebulosity by trying to make them solid, eternal, and unambiguous. Another is to deny meaningfulness altogether, or to say that it is not important, or cannot be known.

Because meaningness is both nebulous and real, these confused stances fail, and cause new, worse problems.

Complete stances acknowledge nebulosity, and its inseparable partner, pattern.

  • 1. I will not give a precise definition of “nebulosity” here. Instead, I present analogies. I apologize if the meaning of “nebulosity” seems frustratingly nebulous. I find that unsatisfactory myself. I hope that an understanding of the word will emerge from its use later in the book. I believe that a rigorous definition is possible; but it would be highly technical. I explain some reasons for that in my page on nebulosity and “emptiness.”
  • 2. In the language of philosophy, nebulosity is an ontological fact, not an epistemological one. As a result, my accounts of eternalism and nihilism differ somewhat from the related accounts given by Robert Ellis. His philosophy is exclusively epistemological, and rejects ontological claims altogether.

Pattern

Clouds with pattern

On the last page, I explained that meanings, like clouds, are nebulous: intangible, non-separable, transient, amorphous, and ambiguous. Meanings are also more or less patterned: reliable, distinct, enduring, clear, and definite.

Nebulosity and pattern might seem to contradict each other, but almost always they come together. Meaning is usually nebulous to some extent, and patterned to some extent.

It can be hard to accept that meaningness is a matter of degree, not either/or. This book is about the confusions that come from assuming meaning must be either totally patterned, or entirely non-existent.

Seeing pattern

Pattern is what makes the world interpretable—what makes it make sense. Perceiving pattern is needed for all effective action—whether you are a person or a bug. Our brains and senses evolved largely to find the patterns that make survival and reproduction possible.

Patterns are everywhere in our experience. The material world is full of patterns: shapes, processes, connections, similarities and differences. Society, culture, thought, and concepts are also patterned.

Since this book is about meaningness, patterns of meaning are particularly relevant.

Being mistaken about pattern

Cloud that looks like a submarine.  Or maybe a shark wearing a hat.  Or something.

Submarine. Or maybe a shark with a big hat. Or something.
(Wikipedia illustration of pareidolia.)

Psychological research shows that people frequently perceive patterns that are not actually there. The brain automatically interprets even completely random events as meaningful. This tendency is called “patternicity” or “apophenia”.

Extreme apophenia is a symptom of psychosis, hallucinogenic drugs, and much of religious experience. But mild examples are universal. It is impossible not to see faces where there are none.

It is also possible, and common, to miss patterns that do exist. (Science, for instance, could be described as a search for non-obvious patterns.)

The brain, however, seems to be wired to give patterns the benefit of the doubt. It would rather make the mistake of seeing non-existent patterns than of rejecting real ones. (Maybe this is because, during evolution, missing real, dangerous patterns was worse than overreacting to imaginary ones.)

Patternicity, eternalism, and nihilism

GODBUNNY IS WATCHING YOU

The natural tendency to see meaningful patterns, even where there are none, makes humans vulnerable to eternalism. Eternalism is the stance that everything is meaningful. It is a cognitive form of apophenia (patternicity).

Eternalism is the core stance of most religions. Mistaken perceptions of meanings are a key to the psychology of religion. (A crude but amusing and particularly clear example is the veneration of supposed religious imagery miraculously arising in random shapes, such as the famous grilled cheese sandwich whose splotches looked like the Virgin Mary’s face.)

The brain’s unwillingness to overlook possible patterns is part of what makes nihilism less common than eternalism. Nihilism is the rejection of all meaning. Although nearly everyone sometimes adopts nihilism momentarily, it is difficult to maintain for long. Meaningful patterns are too obvious.

Fixation and denial

Standing on a raft floating in open ocean

There are two fundamental ways to try to reject nebulosity: by fixating or denying meaningness.

Fixation

Fixation is the strategy of insisting that meanings are clear, definite, permanent, discrete, and objectively certain.

Meaningness is like open ocean: vast, unpredictable, always in motion.1 When meaningness appears murky, chaotic, and disputable, fixation is a natural response.

In fixation, you cling to relatively solid fragments of meaningness and try to lash them together into a raft. Standing shakily on a bundle of splinters, you visualize grass beneath your feet, and try not to feel the rocking of the sea. “Here we are on dry land,” you proclaim. “Here we will build a fortress to keep us safe from the chaos of uncertainty.”

You might as well try to build your castle on a cloud. Since meaningness is inherently nebulous, it cannot work. Whenever an unusually big wave comes along, it tips you off your raft and back in the sea. Later in this book, in the eternalism chapter, we’ll look in detail at common ways you may respond to these inevitable failures. Among these are sentimentality and self-righteous aggression.

Another common reaction: when your own attempts at fixation fail, you may invoke an eternal ordering principle, such as God. These are invented as omnipotent, external forces that fixate meaningness. “God works in mysterious ways. This senseless horror is all part of the Cosmic Plan, even though we cannot understand why.”

Denial

Denial is the strategy of refusing to admit that meaningness exists, or insisting that it is unimportant, for example because it is purely subjective.

When it is obvious that certainty is impossible, that meanings can never be established objectively, that ultimately there is nothing to stand on, denial is a natural response. Meaningness seems too fickle to be relied on. Better to abandon it altogether. Better to try to live in the black emptiness of outer space.

Attempts at denial also always fail, when the pattern of meaningness becomes obvious. No matter how far you are from a planet, the sky is spangled by pinpoint lights of distant stars.

Again, in the nihilism chapter, we’ll investigate common responses to failures of denial. These include defiant rage, intellectualization, and depression.

Mirror images

Fixation and denial are both rejections of nebulosity; and in a sense they are the same rejection. Each fixation is also a denial, and vice versa. Each fixation denies the opposite of what it fixates.

For example, the stance of ethical eternalism fixates a moral code; but that implies denying ethical ambiguity and freedom. Conversely, ethical nihilism denies all ethical imperatives, which implies fixating ethical uncertainty.

Confused stances come in pairs

Confused stances come in mirror-image pairs

Confused stances are strategies for avoiding accepting nebulosity. Each confused stance applies the basic methods of fixation and denial to different aspects of meaningness.

This means that these wrong ideas come in mirror-image pairs. In each pair, one stance fixates what the other denies, and vice versa.

Mirror images

Eternalism and nihilism are the simplest confused stances. Eternalism attempts to fixate all meaningness. Nihilism attempts to deny all meaningness.

Because meaningness is always both nebulous and patterned, eternalism and nihilism both always fail.

Each of the other confused stances denies some aspect of meaningness and fixates another.1 Therefore, they are attempts at compromise between eternalism and nihilism. These increasingly complicated compromises also fail; every dimension of meaningness is both nebulous and patterned.

As a simple example, the stance of true self fixates personal continuity. It insists that there is a mental thing within us that is stable, well-defined, and fully separate: the self. It denies personal nebulosity: the inaccessibility, incoherence, variability, transience, and patchwork quality of this supposed self. The mirror-image stance of no-self fixates personal discontinuity. It denies the pattern of the self: the personality quirks, projects, memories, and relationships that make up an individual.

As a more complicated example, the stances of mission and materialism both fixate personal purpose. However, they agree that purposes can be divided into “eternal” and “mundane” ones. Mission then fixates eternal purposes and denies mundane ones. Materialism fixates mundane purposes and denies eternal ones.

Each of these pairs polarizes meaningness into two unworkable extremes. Because both sides of the polarity refuse to recognize nebulosity (in opposite ways) both fail. Surely the truth lies somewhere in-between? Unfortunately, no: finding the middle ground cannot resolve these dilemmas.

  • 1. One can say that even eternalism and nihilism do this, in a sense. Eternalism attempts to deny meaninglessness, and nihilism attempts to fixate it.

No middle way

No middle way

Wrong ideas about meaningness show up as pairs of polarized, opposite stances. These appear to be extreme views. Surely the truth can be found somewhere between?

Unfortunately, no. The error underlying all confused stances is their refusal to allow nebulosity. Even if some middle ground could be found, it too would reject nebulosity, and so would also be unworkable.

In fact, it’s usually impossible to find a “middle” position anyway. In each pair of confused stances, one categorically denies what the other fixates.

For instance, the stance of true self holds that there is a mysterious essence of the person; the stance of selflessness holds that there is none. The reality of selfness might be described as “between” these extremes, once it is found. But “in the middle” is not a helpful hint for where to look. What is halfway between existence and non-existence?1

To resolve confusions about meaningness, the helpful instruction is to head in the direction of nebulosity. Since both true self and selflessness are evasions of nebulosity, that direction is at right angles to the line between them.

Muddled middles

Some confused stances do arise as attempts at compromise, or at balancing or synthesizing two extremes. I call these “muddled middles.”

Here’s an example.

  • The stance of mission holds that only “eternal” purposes are really meaningful. Its emotional payoff is that you get to feel morally superior and special for pursuing only lofty goals. Its cost is a failure to engage with the mundane aspects of life. Those aspects can be highly satisfying, and can become messy problems for yourself and others if neglected.
  • The mirror-image stance, materialism, holds that only “mundane” purposes are really meaningful. Its emotional payoff is the simplicity and directness of pursuing your own pleasures. Its cost is losing the benefits of eternal purposes, for oneself and others.
  • The muddled middle mingles materialism and mission, and fixates both of them. It is the attempt to satisfy both eternal and mundane purposes simultaneously. For example, you might pursue fame leading a media campaign to save starving Africans, or pursue groupies and a lucrative recording contract as an “alternative” “rebellious” musician.

In fact, most motivations are mixed. When pursuing eternal purposes, one usually hopes for some mundane reward, even if it is only a casual compliment from a friend. This is often sleazy and covert. Authentic compassion and creativity are possible; but there is generally a self-aggrandizing tendency operating at the same time.

This muddled middle preserves both the self-righteous justification of mission and the self-indulgent, self-protective grasping of materialism. So it combines the emotional payoffs of its parent stances. But it also combines their costs. It tends to lose the uncomplicated enjoyment-value of animal satisfaction (because you have to pretend that is not what you seek), and also the unselfconscious compassionate joy of accomplishing eternal purposes (because you have subordinated those to a materialist agenda).

The complete stance that resolves the mission-materialism polarity also recognizes both eternal and mundane purposes. However, it allows both to be nebulous. It strips both sorts of purposes of their selfish emotional payoffs, and also avoids the unnecessary emotional costs of both mission and materialism.

  • 1. Buddhism often speaks of a “middle way” between extremes, including the extremes of existence and non-existence. Although this can be useful when understood in specific Buddhist contexts, it seems unhelpful and potentially confusing elsewhere. For instance, in Western thought, based in Christianity and Ancient Greek philosophy, moderation in all things is often recommended. I am not a great fan of moderation; that is not the resolution I recommend in this book. The “complete stance” I advocate accepts and incorporates extremes. In this, my approach is more similar to those of Nietzsche and Vajrayana Buddhism than to the Western or Buddhist mainstreams.

Accepting nebulosity resolves confusions about meaning

Clouds are not so bad, after all..

The core of this book is a method for resolving confusions about meaningness.

The method can be applied to many sorts of issues. Any topic that involves meaning and meaninglessness I call a “dimension of meaningness.” (These include, for instance, ethics, purpose, and value.)

For any dimension, the method asks:

  • How does nebulosity affect the subject? That is, what makes the issue ambiguous, uncertain, changeable, or impossible to categorize?
  • Why is this nebulosity unattractive? What negative emotions does it provoke?
  • How are fixation and denial used to avoid acknowledging nebulosity? These two strategies try to nail the issue in place, or deny that it exists at all. They produce pairs of “confused stances,” or wrong attitudes to the subject. Why are fixation and denial appealing in this area?
  • How do fixation and denial fail? (You cannot nail clouds down, but they are still real.) What are the consequences of this failure?
  • Consider the possibility that the nebulosity is unavoidable. This means abandoning fixation and denial. It produces the “complete stance” for this dimension of meaningness. What are the consequences of the complete stance?
  • Typically, the complete stance is actually better than the confused ones, but it seems less attractive. How can one overcome this emotional barrier, in order to adopt the complete stance?

This explanation may seem conceptual and abstract at this point. I hope soon to give you an experiential, concrete understanding of it, as well.

This book is meant to be practically useful. Most of it consists of detailed applications of the method to many different dimensions of meaningness.

Not a general dialectic

G.W.F. Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

You might misinterpret the method of resolution I presented on the last page as a “general dialectic,” or means of resolving all false oppositions.

(If you didn’t think that, or if the last sentence made no sense, skip this page. It’s for logic geeks only.)

General dialectics are a big deal in Continental philosophy, particularly in German Idealism. They are popularly associated particularly with Hegel. The system is usually described in terms of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.1

The method of resolution used in this book critically involves the concept of nebulosity. It proceeds by eliminating mistaken fixations and denials of nebulosity. This method cannot resolve false oppositions in which rejection of nebulosity is not the underlying problem.

It is possible that this method could be seen as an instance of some general dialectical system. I would not find that interesting. It is nebulosity, not dialectic, that interests me.

Dialectics are also a big deal in Buddhist philosophy. The central example is Nagarjuña’s explanation of emptiness in terms of “not existence, non-existence, both, or neither.”

There is probably some sort of connection between nebulosity and emptiness. However, I think non-existence is mostly a red herring, and Nagarjuña’s four-fold logic has no obvious similarity with the method I present.

Confusion, completion, misery and joy

Clouds taste metallic

Earlier, I observed that misunderstanding meaningness makes many miserable. I suggest that shifting from confused stances to complete stances can eliminate this “spiritual” suffering.

That is the point of this book. I hope it can help accomplish a positive transformation of your experience of meaningness. It is not meant to be an academic, philosophical analysis.

A couple pages back, I described a method for resolving confusions about meaningness. That explanation may have seemed dry and abstract.

On this page, I sketch one example. Although the discussion here is brief, I hope it is concrete enough that you begin to see how and why the method might work to replace unnecessary misery with joy.

An example: ethics

Let’s look at the dimension of ethics. Here are brief answers to the series of questions asked in the method of resolution.

(I will give much more detailed answers later in the book. I’ve also written more about this approach to ethics elsewhere.)

How does nebulosity manifest in ethics?

We are often faced with moral dilemmas, in which it is unclear what we should do. Usually these are situations in which different ethical norms conflict. For example, one should usually be truthful, but sometimes telling the truth would result in harm.

There doesn’t seem to be any general way of resolving such problems. Similar situations often seem to have dissimilar ethical implications; right action seems to have unlimited dependence on the context.

Why is this unattractive?

We want to do the right thing, but don’t always know what that is. This uncertainty can provoke intense anxiety.

Often we do harm that later we bitterly regret, and punish ourselves accordingly. However, we may not see how we could have avoided it, given ethical uncertainty.

How are fixation and denial used to avoid acknowledging the nebulosity of ethics?

One can try to fixate ethics by formulating totalitarian ethical codes that are supposed to tell you what to do in every situation. This is attractive because it suggests that it is possible to avoid ever being morally culpable—so long as you always follow the code.

Or, one can deny that ethics are meaningful at all, and refuse to take moral responsibility for your actions. This is another way of avoiding culpability.

How do these confused stances fail?

Ethical situations are unboundedly complex and variable. Any finite, fixed set of rules will sometimes require actions that are obviously harmful, for no reason beyond “that’s the rule.” In such cases, you are faced with the horrible choice of violating rules you believed sacred, or creating needless suffering by obeying them.

A fixed code also will fail to promote some beneficial actions in situations that present unusual opportunities.

Refusing to acknowledge ethical imperatives can sometimes work to one’s personal advantage. Obviously, it tends to harm others, though.

It also seems that humans are incapable of consistent ethical nihilism. Humans evolved to be ethical; that is just how our brains work. It’s usually impossible to avoid all shame and guilt. Even sociopaths, whose brains lack ethical function, do not often seem to have satisfactory lives.

What if ethics were unavoidably nebulous?

This opens the possibility of ethical responsiveness coupled with ethical freedom.

If ethics are unavoidably nebulous, in many situations there is no one “right thing” to do. Instead, there are alternatives with subtle trade-offs. We have the duty to pay close attention to the details, while also maintaining openness to the situation as a whole.

We also often have the privilege of choice. Where there is no definite right answer, we are free. We can choose at will. We also have room for creative improvisation: finding ethical solutions that are not applications of general principles.

This stance requires letting go of the fantasy that we could always avoid culpability. We have to accept that, inevitably, we will sometimes make ethical mistakes.

Regretting ethical mistakes makes us less likely to repeat them. However, acknowledging their inevitability means that we can let go of ethical anxiety. Ethical maturity is measured by the ability to find good-enough solutions to ethical problems, not by the amount you punish yourself.

What helps adopt the complete stance?

We need to destabilize the confused stances, by understanding their defects, and stabilize the complete one, by understanding its advantages.

In this case, confusion is destabilized by understanding that it is not feasible to achieve blamelessness, either by following the rules or by denying ethics altogether. Both approaches inevitably cause needless harm to oneself and others.

The complete stance is stabilized by understanding that ethical freedom can be a source of benevolent joy, not mean-spirited selfishness. It is stabilized by understanding that ethical responsiveness eliminates anxiety, and is not an intolerable burden of infinite responsibility without control.

Meaningness as a liberating practice

Breaking the chain of confusion

Mistaken ideas about meaningness inhibit creativity, constrict your life, and make you miserable. This book is meant as a practical manual for overcoming these confused stances, liberating you from their negative effects. It offers specific antidotes for particular confusions.

Thinking differently

A “stance” is a pattern of thinking, feeling, and eventually acting. Each of those reinforces the others, and helps maintain the stance.

The methods described in this book mainly work by changing thinking. It’s also possible to work with feelings and actions; I’ll make occasional suggestions about those too.

The main method is to become familiar with the thoughts and feelings characteristic of each confused stance, so that you notice them as they occur; and then choose to think differently. Simply remembering that there is a better alternative—a complete stance—is often most of the battle. However, it’s also necessary to understand how and why this alternative is better, and that can take some work. If the complete stances were obviously better, no one would adopt the confused ones.

The next page explains the method in more detail, in terms of various “aspects” of each stance.

Similar methods

Cognitive restructuring

Cognitive restructuring is the central method of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). Cognitive restructuring is also a practice of “thinking differently,” by noticing patterns of dysfunctional, emotion-laden thought, and replacing them with more accurate and functional ones. CBT, like Meaningness, suggests that patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior reinforce each other. Interestingly, like my approach, CBT draws on Eastern religion and Western philosophy.

The specific patterns of thinking/feeling/acting CBT works with, called cognitive distortions, have almost no overlap with my confused stances. So the method is similar, but the content is mainly quite different. (One point of commonality: CBT aims to overcome “absolutism,” perhaps similar to eternalism. In place of absolutism, it promotes “flexibility,” perhaps similar to the complete stance’s attitude toward nebulosity.)

Unlike CBT, Meaningness is not intended as therapy, and is not concerned with psychopathology. However, because the method is similar, the two might be complementary or synergistic. Perhaps Meaningness offers CBT practitioners an expanded set of dysfunctional patterns to address; I’m not qualified to say.

Rationalism

Several communities aim to improve normal (non-psychopathological) thinking, using a similar method. They identify common patterns of dysfunctional thought; each can be replaced with a better alternative. Among these communities are the rationalist, skeptical, and critical thinking movements.

In early versions, these movements concentrated on logical fallacies—errors in thinking alone. Increasingly, they have recognized the importance of cognitive biases, many of which involve emotions distorting thought.

The lists of these errors (linked in the previous paragraph) have little overlap with my list of confused stances. It seems likely that rationalism, skepticism, and critical thinking can be synergistic with the Meaningness approach. (That is my experience, anyway!) However, rationalism can sometimes slide into eternalism, a dysfunctional, confused stance. I’ll discuss later how to avoid that danger.

Recently, insights about cognitive biases have crossed over with CBT, as cognitive bias modification therapy. Maybe a three-way synergy is possible!

Meditation

This book grew partly out of my engagement with Buddhist philosophy. That philosophy is closely related to Buddhist meditation methods. I have found that the two support each other—as Buddhism says.

In meditation, you watch yourself thinking, without interfering. Then you discover what you are thinking, and how. It comes as a shock to most people to realize that they actually didn’t know—and another shock to learn the typical contents of their thoughts.

Because meditation reveals the process and content of your thoughts, it’s probably synergistic with any of the three “think differently” methods (Meaningness, CBT, and rationalism). And, indeed, meditation is increasingly combined with CBT to create various crossover therapies. There’s also considerable interest in meditation in the rationalist community.

According to Buddhist theory, meditation eventually allows you to experience “emptiness,” which is closely related to my “nebulosity”; and after that “the nonduality of emptiness and form,” which is related to the inseparability of nebulosity and pattern. That inseparability is the hallmark of the complete stances.

Action

Confused stances make you miserable directly; but even worse, they make you take dysfunctional actions that harm yourself and others. Some helpful interventions can replace dysfunctional actions with functional ones. These include both individual activities and social or group practices.

My current (July 2014) plan for this book does not include much material about action, but I’m coming to think it should. So, this may change.

The psychological anatomy of a stance

Dancer taking a peculiar stance

Each stance, or basic attitude toward meaningness, is a transient pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting. The Meaningness practice involves learning to recognize these patterns. Then you know what stance you are in at any moment, and ways to shift from any confused stance to a complete one.

I describe each stance in terms of a series of aspects. This page explains what the aspects are, and how noticing them is useful.

In the main part of this book, I provide a “schematic overview” page for each dimension of meaningness. The overview includes a table, with rows corresponding to the aspects of the different stances for relating to that dimension.

The discussion on this page may seem unhelpfully abstract. It will probably be useful to go back and forth between reading it and looking at an example schematic. You can see one here, covering eternalism and nihilism—the two most basic confused stances.

If you haven’t already read my introduction to eternalism and nihilism, it would be good to do that first.

The mistaken metaphysical assumption

A confused stance is based on an underlying mistaken metaphysical assumption. The assumption is usually unthought: not understood, or entirely outside awareness. Typically the assumption draws a distinction that is a false dilemma; so confused stances mainly come in pairs, which share the underlying assumption but take opposite sides of it.

Surfacing the assumption, and seeing how it is wrong, makes it possible to understand and adopt the corresponding complete stance.

What it denies and what it fixates

Each confused stance wrongly denies something about meaningness, and fixates something else. Stances allied with eternalism deny the nebulosity of a dimension of meaningness, and fixate a pattern. Stances allied with nihilism deny the pattern and fixate the dimension’s non-existence.

Recognizing how nebulosity and pattern work together moves one into the complete stance for that dimension.

Pattern of thinking

When you adopt a stance, a characteristic texture of thinking, feeling, and perhaps acting comes with it. The stance makes that way of being seem sensible. Also, that way of being makes the stance seem sensible.

For example, nihilism usually makes you depressed. Likewise, when you are depressed for other reasons, nihilism may seem obviously right.

Sales pitch and emotional appeal

The “sales pitch” is a slogan that encapsulates the language used to promote the stance.

A confused stance’s emotional appeal is the reason it is attractive. Each confused stance plays to some need for security, excitement, or self-aggrandizement.

Noticing that you are getting sucked in by the emotional promise made by a confused stance, and knowing that it cannot deliver on them, helps free you from it.

The complete stances are, unfortunately, less emotionally appealing. (Otherwise, we’d adopt them easily.) However, they are more realistic.

How a confused stance causes suffering

Confused stances distort experience by fixating and denying particular sorts of meaningness. When these mistaken perceptions collide with reality, emotional pain results.

Each confused stance produces a characteristic pattern of misunderstanding and misery.

Obstacles to maintaining a stance

The confused stances constantly collide with reality. It is impossible not to see this, and impossible not to suffer the consequences. This makes it impossible to remain consistently in a confused stance; they are always unstable.

A confused stance’s patterns of collision with reality—the obstacles to maintaining it—are resources for switching into a complete stance.

Unfortunately there are obstacles to adopting the complete stances, as well. Generally, complete stances are conceptually obscure, and appear emotionally unsatisfying.

Likely next stances

Because stances are unstable, we frequently stumble from one to another, without being clearly aware that we are doing this. In fact, all of the confused stances described in this book will be thoroughly familiar to every reader.

When a particular obstacle to maintaining one stance arises, there are typical routes into likely next stances. Knowing this, one can recognize an upcoming transition into a confused stance, and re-direct oneself into a complete stance instead.

Antidotes and counter-thoughts

These are ways of getting yourself out of a confused stance.

Simply recognizing that you are caught in one, and remembering that there is a better alternative, is often most of the battle.

Beyond that, one can notice particular confused patterns, and cut through them with specific counter-thoughts.1 Counter-thoughts can work in two ways. Some move from a confused stance to the complete stance. Others destabilize the confused stance, to make it less attractive so that you are more likely to jump to the complete stance spontaneously. (In those cases, though, one needs to guard against simply moving to a different confused stance.)

Intelligent features of a confused stance

Each confused stance is intelligent in some way. If it did not have a powerful logic to it, an almost-truth, we would not get stuck in it. Each approximates a complete stance, which is actually correct.

Noticing how the confused stance you have adopted is nearly right is helpful in several ways:

  • It avoids “I’m a bad person because I fell into a confused stance again,” which is discouraging, and more likely to make you abandon the practice than to continue.
  • It lets you see why you’ve adopted it.
  • It helps point the way to a complete stance that shares the same accurate insight.
  • It is the basis for appropriation—the use of a confused stance to communicate the corresponding complete stance.
  • 1. This is similar to “cognitive shifting,” a psychotherapeutic approach. Apparently its development was influenced by Eastern religion—as Meaningness also was.

Adopting, committing, accomplishing, wavering, appropriating

Adopting a karate stance

A stance is a basic attitude toward meaningness. A stance is a tool for understanding, from which you may act. This pages defines a series of terms that describe ways you can take up such a tool.

Adopting

To adopt a stance is to use it, at a particular moment, as a way of addressing a problem of meaningness.

For example, to adopt the stance of materialism means to think about purpose in terms of “mundane” or personal benefit.

As I explained earlier, stances are unstable. Frequently one adopts a stance only for a few seconds or minutes, before abandoning it for another one.

Mostly, people are not aware of the stances they adopt.

Committing (and rejecting)

To commit to a stance means to decide to adopt it consistently in the future. For example, you might resolve always to adopt mission as an approach to purpose, rather than materialism.

The various stances that concern a particular dimension of meaningness contradict each other, and are mutually exclusive. Committing to one implies rejecting the others. For example, committing to thinking of yourself as ordinary implies rejecting the stances of specialness and nobility.

Commitment via systems

Although people actually think about meaningness in terms of stances, mostly they think they think about meaningness in terms of “systems.” Systems include religions, philosophies, ideologies, spiritual and psychological frameworks, and so forth.

Because people are mostly not aware of stances, it is somewhat unusual to commit to a stance directly. Instead, people commit to systems, which in turn demand certain stances.

An obvious example: most Western religions require the stance of eternalism. To be a good Christian, you are supposed to adopt eternalism whenever questions of meaningness arise.

Two more examples: some psychological ideologies require the stance of true self; some political ideologies require the stance of romantic rebellion.

Accomplishing

To accomplish a stance means that you actually do consistently adopt it, every time its dimension of meaningness becomes an issue. For example, accomplishing nihilism would mean that you always regard everything as meaningless.

Accomplishing a stance is difficult. Obvious, everyday evidence constantly contradicts all the confused stances. The complete stances are subtle and emotionally unsatisfactory.

In most cases, I think accomplishment is impossible in practice. Human beings are not actually put together in a way that makes it possible to see everything as meaningless. (Or as meaningful, as would be required to accomplish eternalism.)

Wavering

If you have committed to a stance, and have not accomplished it, you must apply effort to adopt it in cases in which it doesn’t seem to fit; and you often fail. I call this wavering.

Wavering causes emotional and cognitive problems. I explain what these problems are, for each specific stance, in the main part of this book.

These problems can be overcome. For confused stances, I show how to recognize them, and how to use them as a spur to adopting the corresponding complete stance instead. For complete stances, I show how to resolve the difficulties.

Appropriating

Each confused stance, although mistaken and usually damaging when adopted, is based on a valuable insight. (Otherwise, it would not be attractive at all.)

For example, monism, the idea that “all is One,” is based on the accurate insight that we are not isolated individuals, that there is no hard boundary between self and other, and that things are connected in innumerable ways, many of which we cannot know.

When one adopts a complete stance, the intelligent aspects of confused stances can be appropriated as tools. A complete stance is “complete” in that it incorporates the intelligent parts of the opposed confused stances for that dimension of meaningness. From the standpoint of the complete stance, the confused stances (which everyone understands) can be used to communicate the complete insight, and to draw others to it.

For example, although it is not true that “all is One,” the language of monism may be useful in explaining that things are non-separate—which is true.

Doing meaning better

warrior woman taking a stance

This is the main division of the book Meaningness. After a couple of introductory pages, each of its chapters discusses one dimension of meaningness, and the stances we take to that dimension.

It discusses both confused stances—dysfunctional, incorrect ways of relating to meaning—and the functional, accurate complete stances. For each confused stance, it suggests antidotes, and ways to shift to the complete stance for its dimension.

The Big Three stance combinations

Three silly stances: a hair metal trio

Complex ideologies are based on collections of simple stances: fundamental attitudes toward meaningness. Some stances (addressing different dimensions of meaningness) work together well; others clash. Most systems align with one of three common combinations.

These combinations are:

  • Dualist eternalism: everything is given a definite meaning by something separate from you. Christianity and Islam are based on this combination; God is what gives everything meaning.
  • Monist eternalism: you, God, and the universe are a single thing, which is definitely meaningful. Advaita Hinduism is monist and eternalist, as is much current pop spirituality.
  • Dualist nihilism: we are isolated individuals, wandering in a meaningless universe. Existentialism, postmodernism, and scientism tend to dualist nihilism.

Each of the three primary combinations typically comes with a corresponding collection of secondary stances; I’ll get to that in a minute.

The apparent lack of alternatives

Regarding the fundamental questions of meaning—does it exist, and where does it come from?—these three are the only well-known possibilities. I think all three are wrong; this book advocates a fourth combination of stances (about which I’ll say something at the end of this page).

Each of the Big Three has serious, obvious defects. However, people often commit to one of them primarily because it looks less bad than the other two.

Understanding this, you can see that much of the rhetoric supporting systems boils down to “less bad”:

  • “God must exist, because otherwise there is no purpose in living, and you have no way of telling right from wrong.”
  • “A God who is someone somewhere else cannot end your alienation from other beings. Enlightenment is possible only here, now. Only by being God can you overcome the isolation and limitations of material embodiment.”
  • “You have to admit that everything is meaningless, because we know God is a fairy tale.”

No monist nihilism

Considering the two primary axes eternalism/nihilism and monism/dualism, there is a fourth possibility: monist nihilism. That is the view that “all is One, and it is meaningless.” Although this is conceptually coherent, it has few (if any) advocates. Apparently it is not emotionally attractive in the way the other combinations are.1

So, in practice, monism always implies eternalism, and nihilism always implies dualism. In the rest of this book, I’ll often speak simply of “monism” or “nihilism,” and you can take the eternalism and dualism for granted.

Other stances in the Big Three combinations

In addition to the four stances to fundamental questions of meaningness, there are stances to more specific dimensions such as purpose, ethics, and the nature of the self. These are commonly folded in with the Big Three combinations when people build ideological systems.

In some cases, the choices are forced. If you think nothing is meaningful (nihilism) then you have to accept that can be no ethics (ethical nihilism).

More often, the choices of stance toward specific dimensions of meaningness are logically independent. For example, both reasonable respectability and romantic rebellion are logically consistent with eternalism.

However, each of the Big Three has a typical emotional texture, which may be more or less compatible with other stances. Dualist eternalism generally combines with reasonable respectability, not romantic rebellion; that is far more likely to go along with nihilism. Dualist eternalism has meaning coming from some Cosmic Plan, and you had better obey what it says.

Most (if not all) systems are somewhat incoherent, and one system may take opposing stances to different specific cases. The psychological instability of stances reinforces this.

Dualist eternalism: typical combinations

The typical2 emotional texture of dualist eternalism is self-righteousness. You are validated by the eternal ordering principle.

Typically, dualist eternalism combines with:

  • Mission: your purpose is to carry out the Cosmic Plan.
  • Ethical eternalism: the eternal ordering principle says what is right and wrong.
  • Reasonable respectability: society is a reflection of the Cosmic Plan, and you should obey authority.
  • Religiosity: the eternal ordering principle says what is sacred and what is profane.
  • Causality: everything happens for the best, in accord with the Cosmic Plan. (Except free will lets us do evil.)

Nihilism: typical combinations

The typical emotional texture of nihilism is defiant negativity. It sucks that the universe is meaningless, but you hate (and want to shout down) eternalists who proclaim the lie of meaningfulness.

Typically, nihilism combines with:

  • Materialism: since there is no real purpose to life, you might as well get stuff you want.
  • Ethical nihilism: ethics are as meaningless as everything else.
  • Romantic rebellion: society is an oppressive, meaningless fiction.
  • Secularism: nothing is sacred.
  • Chaos: the universe is random; nothing happens for any particular reason.

Monism: typical combinations

The typical emotional texture of monism is smug stupidity. Convinced you are God, you believe you understand everything effortlessly, so you don’t need to try to figure anything out.

Typically, monism combines with:

  • Mission: your purpose is to realize your Godhood, and then help others realize theirs.
  • True self: your essential nature is indivisible from God.
  • Total responsibility: as God, you create the entire universe.
  • Specialness: as God, you are the only valuable thing in existence.
  • Causality: everything that occurs is your own doing.

Complete stances align with each other

This book advocates a fourth combination of stances: the ones I describe as complete.

Its typical emotional texture is appreciative curiosity.

Here’s how some complete stances align:

  • Meaningness: things may be meaningful, meaningless, or may be ambiguously between. It’s worth investigating meanings, but you can’t always expect answers.
  • Participation: there is no one right way of drawing boundaries; things can be connected in many different ways, and can also have no significant connection. Finding unexpected connections and redrawing boundaries is often valuable; so is recognizing irrelevance.
  • Intermittently continuing: selfness is valuable and should not be rejected; it can usefully be explored, but it has no essential nature.
  • Enjoyable usefulness: purposes are co-created in an appreciative, compassionate dance with the world.
  • Ethical responsiveness: ethics are not a matter of personal or cultural choice, but are fluid and have no definite source.
  • 1. You might enjoy working out some consequences of monist nihilism. If you are a philosophy geek, you might also wonder whether there are any historical figures who fit the category.
  • 2. These textures are tendencies, not absolutes. Some committed dualist eternalists are free from self-righteousness, for instance.

Schematic overview: all dimensions

This page is a schematic overview of the main part of the book Meaningness. It briefly describes the various stances one can take to each of the dimensions of meaningness.

The meanings of the rows in the tables are explained in “The psychological anatomy of a stance.”

Meaning and meaninglessness

Stance Eternalism Nihilism Meaning/ness
Summary Everything is given a fixed meaning by an eternal ordering principle (Cosmic Plan) Nothing is really meaningful Meaning is nebulous, yet patterned; meaningfulness and meaninglessness intermingle
What it denies Nebulosity; meaninglessness Pattern; meaningfulness
What it fixates Meaning Meaninglessness
The sales pitch You are guaranteed a good outcome if you follow the rules You don’t have to care!
Don’t get fooled again
Accurate understanding of meaningness allows both freedom and purpose
Emotional appeal Certainty; understanding; control. Reassurance that if you act in accordance with Cosmic Plan, everything will be well. Intelligence. Also, nothing means anything, so not getting what you want is not a problem.
Pattern of thinking Deliberate stupidity; sentimentality; self-righteousness Contempt; rage; intellectualization; depression; anxiety Joyful realism
Likely next stances Mission Materialism
Accomplishment Unify your self with Cosmic Plan Total apathy Wizardry
How it causes suffering Action based on imagined meanings fails; narrowed scope for action; Cosmic Plan makes insane, harmful demands Have to blind self to meaningfulness; undermines any practical action
Obstacles to maintaining the stance Difficulty of blinding oneself to manifestations of nebulosity, and submitting to Cosmic Plan Difficulty of blinding self to manifestations of pattern, and abandoning all desires Unappealing due to complexity and uncertainty
Antidotes; counter-thoughts Curiosity; realism; intelligence; enjoyment of nebulosity, meaninglessness, un-knowing Enjoyment of pattern; recovery of passion
Intelligent aspect There is meaning, and it is not merely subjective, so nihilism is wrong There are no inherent, objective, or eternal meanings, so eternalism is wrong
Positive appropriation after resolution Respect for pattern is a compassionate aspect of realism Recognition of nebulosity is a wisdom aspect of nihilism; nearly-correct understanding of defects of eternalism

Unity, diversity, and separateness

Stance Monism Dualism Participation
Summary All is One I am clearly distinct from everything and everyone else Reality is indivisible but diverse
What it denies Differences, boundaries, specifics, individuality Connection, dynamic interplay, unbounded responsibility
What it fixates Unity; also over-emphasizes connection Boundaries, separateness, limitations, definitions
The sales pitch You are God Clarity gives you control
Emotional appeal I am all-powerful, all-knowing, immortal, invulnerable I am not contaminated by other beings, and have only specific, limited responsibility for them
Pattern of thinking Willful stupidity Distrust Engagement
Likely next stances Eternalism, mission, true self, specialness Can combine with either eternalism or nihilism
Accomplishment Directly perceive all things as One Perfect independence Self and other neither distinct nor identical
How it causes suffering Have to blind self to diversity of physical reality Alienation due to being cut off from world and others
Obstacles to maintaining the stance Obviousness of diversity Obviousness of connection Difficulty of understanding the philosophical view
Antidotes; counter-thoughts Appreciation of diversity Appreciation of connectedness
Intelligent aspect I am not entirely separate from anything The world is endlessly diverse
Positive appropriation after resolution Provisional understanding of indivisibility Points toward appreciation of diversity

Purpose

Stance Mission Materialism Enjoyable usefulness
Summary Only eternal purposes are meaningful Only mundane purposes are meaningful All purposes are meaningful, when they are. Do things that are useful and enjoyable.
What it denies Value of mundane purposes Value of eternal purposes
What it fixates Value of eternal purposes Value of mundane purposes
The sales pitch Find and follow your true mission, and the universe resonates with you He who dies with the most toys, wins There is no scoreboard
Emotional appeal Exciting, personal, transcendent purpose lifts you out of mundanity Get what you want
Pattern of thinking Fantasy; non-ordinary methods for seeking the supposed true mission Grim self-interest Flow
Likely next stances Eternalism; specialness, true self Nihilism; ordinariness Nobility, intermittently continuing
Accomplishment Sacrifice all mundane purposes to eternal mission (saintliness) Exclusive self-interest Rennaisance person
How it causes suffering Can never find your supposed true mission; neglect mundane aspects of life Can never get enough; alienation from others and from authentic creativity
Obstacles to maintaining the stance Reasonable self-interest Compassion, creativity Is that it? No hope of completing purpose, so no hope for salvation or basis for self-congratulation
Antidotes; counter-thoughts Mundane purposes matter to me I do care about others, and about creative work
Intelligent aspect Eternal purposes are valid; materialism is unsatisfying Mundane purposes are valid; mission is a fantasy
Positive appropriation after resolution Creativity and generosity are aspects of enjoyable usefulness Material satisfaction and accomplishment are aspects of enjoyable usefulness

Self

Stance The authentic, true, deep self Selflessness Intermittently continuing
Summary The hidden, true self is directly connected to the Cosmic Plan, bypassing social constrictions There is, or should be, no self Selfness comes and goes; it varies over time and has no essential nature
What it denies Nebulosity of self Patterns of self; the self/other boundary; natural self-interest
What it fixates The patterns of selfness; the self/other boundary Discontinuity; absence of self/other boundary
The sales pitch Your true self is much more exciting than your yucky regular one You can get rid of your yucky regular self The patterned self is unproblematic once its nebulosity is accepted
Emotional appeal I’m much better than I thought I was I have nothing to lose
Pattern of thinking Romantic idolization of fantasy self Willful blindness to continuity and self-interest Humorous affection for one’s foibles; absence of anxiety
Likely next stances Eternalism, monism, specialness Nihilism, ordinariness Nobility, enjoyable usefulness
Accomplishment Authenticity in sense of living from true self instead of regular self Egolessness Conjuring supple, playful magic in the shared self/other space
How it causes suffering Attempts to retrieve supposed true self fail; attempts to live up to it fail Neglecting practical personal affairs
Obstacles to maintaining the stance Non-existence of true self Manifestations of regular self Fear of discontinuity; cannot repair or remove self
Antidotes; counter-thoughts No essential nature, no coherent true self I have much in common with who I was and will be
Intelligent aspect Recognizes negative social conditioning & possibility of spontaneity Recognizes lack of essential nature or durable continuity
Positive appropriation after resolution Points toward power of nobility: we can be much more than we generally pretend Points toward generosity of nobility

Personal value

Stance Specialness Ordinariness Nobility
Summary I have a distinct and superior value given by the eternal ordering principle My value comes from being like everyone else Developing all my abilities in order to serve others
What it denies Shared humanity Unusualness
What it fixates Personal value Personal value
The sales pitch You are better than they are Don’t put on airs Be all you can be
Emotional appeal Reinforces ego No need to live up to potential
Pattern of thinking Disdain; self-aggrandisement Fearfulness, laziness Impeccability
Likely next stances Mission, true self Materialism Enjoyable usefulness
Accomplishment Autoapotheosis Baaaaaa Heroism
How it causes suffering Ego-trips; role anxiety; need for constant confirmation Suppression of individuality
Obstacles to maintaining the stance Familiarity of experience; maintaining image is exhausting Unusual impulses; cannot conform to herd Selfishness; fear; laziness
Antidotes; counter-thoughts Recognition of shared humanity Recognition of potential and uniqueness
Intelligent aspect Recognition of potential and uniqueness Recognition of shared humanity
Positive appropriation after resolution Nobility does rise above the ordinary Humility is an aspect of nobility

Capability

Stance Total responsibility Victim-think Light-heartedness
Summary We each create our own reality and are responsible for everything that happens in it It’s not my fault and I am too weak to deal with it Playfully co-create reality in collaboration with each other and the world
What it denies Contingency, limits Responsibility, capability, freedom
What it fixates Responsibility Overwhelming power of circumstances
The sales pitch Perfect circumstances can be achieved with sufficient effort You are oppressed and therefore blameless
Emotional appeal Fantasy of control over future No need to make any effort No need for self-criticism or for anxiety
Pattern of thinking Aggressive, paranoid Fearful, depressed, emotionally manipulative Effortless accomplishment
Likely next stances Specialness, true self, mission Ordinariness, materialism Nobility, ethical responsiveness
Accomplishment King of the Universe Have all needs met by exploiting others’ pity Effortless creativity
How it causes suffering Hypervigilance; can’t meet infinite requirements with finite capacity Resentment, depression, neglect of opportunities
Obstacles to maintaining the stance Obviousness of limits Obviousness of opportunities Hard to let go of need to be reassured about outcomes
Antidotes; counter-thoughts Letting go of fantasies of accomplishment; willingness to fail Gratitude; letting go of payoffs; walking away; practical action
Intelligent aspect Recognition of possibility Recognition of limits
Positive appropriation after resolution Experience depends more on our own perception & action than is usually thought Because we have finite capabilities, we can cut ourselves some slack

Ethics

Stance Ethical eternalism Ethical nihilism Ethical responsiveness
Summary The Cosmic Plan dictates a fixed ethical code according to which we ought to live Ethics is a meaningless human invention and has no real claim on us Ethics is centrally important to humans, and is not a matter of choice, but is fluid and has no definite source
What it denies Ambiguity of ethics; freedom; courage; creativity Ethical imperativeness
What it fixates Ethical code (rules/laws) Absence of ethical absolutes
The sales pitch Cosmic justice guarantees reward/punishment if you obey/defy the ethical code Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law Ethical anxiety is unnecessary
Emotional appeal Avoiding blame; preventing others from harming/offending you Take what you want; don’t let morality get in the way
Pattern of thinking Self-righteousness Arrogance Light-hearted concern
Likely next stances Religiosity, mission Secularism, materialism Light-heartedness, nobility
Accomplishment Remorseless soldier of God Sociopathy Ethical maturity
How it causes suffering Harmful actions are sometimes required by the supposed rules; beneficial ones may not be promoted Without ethics, harmful actions are just rational self-interest
Obstacles to maintaining the stance Situations in which ethical rules are unclear or promote obvious harm Natural concern for others Requires close attention to particulars; no guarantee of blamelessness
Antidotes; counter-thoughts Allowing ethical ambiguity Respecting ethical imperatives
Intelligent aspect Recognizes the importance of ethics Recognizes the ambiguity of ethics
Positive appropriation after resolution Points toward nobility Points toward ethical maturity

Social authority

Stance Reasonable respectability Romantic rebellion Freedom
Summary Contribute to social order by conforming to traditions Make an artistic statement by defying authority Value social order as a resource; satirize it as an impediment
What it denies Nebulosity of social order Value of social order
What it fixates Social order Heroic status of the counter-culture
The sales pitch Law’n’order Death to the oppressors!
Emotional appeal It’s safe It’s sexy
Pattern of thinking Emotional constriction Confused romantic passion, testosterone poisoning Political maturity
Likely next stances Ordinariness; dualism Specialness; mission; nihilistic rage; true self Nobility, light-heartedness, kadag
Accomplishment Pillar of society Romantic martyrdom
How it causes suffering Complicity in oppression; abandoning of responsibility and moral maturity Opposes realistic action to ameliorate conditions; justifies violence
Obstacles to maintaining the stance Social conventions stifle expression and opportunity Silly; doomed by definition Urgency of social imperatives
Antidotes; counter-thoughts Who cares what they think? I’m being silly and just striking a pose to look cool
Intelligent aspect Recognizes value of social order Recognizes arbitrary and restrictive character of social order
Positive appropriation after resolution Points toward kingly qualities of nobility; society as a beneficial structure Points toward warrior qualities of nobility; charismatically involving; makes splendid art

Sacredness

Stance Religiosity Secularism Kadag
Summary The sacred and the profane are clearly distinct in the Cosmic Plan Sacredness is mere superstition; nothing is sacred Because nothing is inherently sacred, everything can be sacred
What it denies Nebulosity of sacredness; vastness Sacredness; vastness
What it fixates The sacred Arbitrariness of perception of sacredness
The sales pitch Avoid contamination through ritual purity Freed from religion, we can get on with practical projects The good bits of religion without the dogma
Emotional appeal Personal superiority through religious conformity; minimize uncanniness of vastness by codifying it Don’t have to think about that uncomfortable religion stuff; pretend you don’t see vastness and hope it goes away Can neither dismiss nor grab onto sacredness
Pattern of thinking Self-righteousness Pretending not to care about meaning; apathy Awe
Likely next stances Reasonable respectability, mission, specialness Materialism, ordinariness Freedom
Accomplishment Perfect ritual purity Total inability to experience awe Ability to experience anything as sacred
How it causes suffering Paranoia about contamination; resources and opportunities wasted; tribalist vilification Flatness of existence in the absence of the sacred
Obstacles to maintaining the stance Obvious mundanity of religious forms Spontaneous religious feelings Innate reactions of disgust
Antidotes; counter-thoughts Purity is a matter of perception, not truth I do sometimes experience awe
Intelligent aspect Recognition of sacredness Recognition that nothing is inherently sacred
Positive appropriation after resolution Sacredness matters Narrow religion is harmful; something better is available

Contingency

Stance Causality Chaos Flow
Summary Everything happens for the best, in accord with the Cosmic Plan. (Except free will lets us do evil.) The universe is random; nothing happens for any particular reason There are no ultimate causes, and causation is nebulous, but we naturally observe patterns
What it denies Pointless suffering Interpretability
What it fixates Reasons [Nothing]
The sales pitch There is no need to suffer, so long as you conform to the Cosmic Plan [This is a hard sell ] God is dead. Dance with reality
Emotional appeal Can pretend there is no pointless suffering [This may be only a theoretical possibility]
Pattern of thinking Kitsch Despair Realism
Likely next stances Eternalism, religiosity Nihilism, secularism
Accomplishment Pollyanna, Candide La Nausé (Sartre) Maximal ability to influence events, without attachment to outcome
How it causes suffering Denying pointless suffering makes it hard to alleviate [Theoretically, inability to take practical action]
Obstacles to maintaining the stance Obviousness of pointless suffering (our own and others’) Obviousness of causality No guarantees
Antidotes; counter-thoughts Lots of stuff just happens [Probably not necessary]
Intelligent aspect Things often do make sense Things often are inherently uninterpretable
Positive appropriation after resolution Points toward pragmatic competence Points toward comfort with uncertainty

Meaning and meaninglessness

This book is based on the idea that meaning can be real but nebulous: ambiguous, variable, and context-dependent. This is an uncommon stance.

The more common stances are eternalism (that meanings are fixed and well-defined); and nihilism (that meaning is entirely non-existent). This chapter explains the psychological dynamics of these confused stances in detail.

The mistaken assumption shared by eternalism and nihilism is that meaning must be objective to be real. Existentialism took an alternative stance, that meanings are subjective and personal. This chapter begins to explain why that is also a mistake. A detailed account must be postponed into the next chapter, which investigates issues of the inside/outside boundary, mind and world, self and other. The view of Meaningness is that all these distinctions are nebulous, and that meaning is neither subjective nor objective. Instead, it is an interaction that crosses all these boundaries.

This chapter also begins to explain the complete stance, which allows for nebulous meaning. It only makes a beginning, because the nebulosity of meaning involves concepts that I can introduce only gradually. Understanding of the nature of meaning will, I hope, accumulate throughout your reading of the book. Ultimately, meaningness is itself a nebulous concept, and cannot be specified with complete precision.

The puzzle of meaningness

Hands with wedding rings

Two years ago, well into a mainly happy marriage, you began a secret affair.

The attraction was overwhelming. The sex was scalding. You loved with a passion you had never felt before.

Your lover—also married—understood parts of you that your spouse did not. You were able to be a different person. You explored aspects of your personality that you had never been able to express before. You made different sorts of jokes. You went on adventurous dates, trying things your spouse—who you knew was sweet but a bit dull when you got married—would never have agreed to do.

After a year and a bit, the passion waned. Your secret meetings began to feel slightly repetitive. You found that your personalities would not be compatible in the long term. You wanted quite different things out of life.

It began to seem you were going through the motions. You had one meaningless fight about nothing. Then you discussed the future, and agreed to end the affair on good terms.

Now, you wonder: what did that mean?

Where did the meaning go?

In the beginning, the affair seemed enormously significant. By the end, it had slid into a casual friendship plus sex.

Were you wrong to think it was meaningful at the start? Was it always meaningless? Or did it have a meaning that it lost?

Perhaps the original meaning lives on in memory, and in the changes in you? You know that the effects of the affair will reverberate for years to come. But what meaning will it have in ten, twenty, thirty years, when life has moved on to other dramas? What could it mean after everyone involved is dead?

How could meaningfulness come and go? To be more than just an opinion, or a feeling, shouldn’t meanings stay the same eternally?

The ethical dimension

“Eternal” reminds you uncomfortably that, of course, there is an ethical dimension to adultery. From the beginning, and all through the affair, you could not ignore that.

You grew up Christian, and you know that any pastor would say that adultery is always wrong. But you left the Church in your teens, when you decided you had to say what was right and wrong in the Bible, not the other way around.

You also have friends who say a married affair is definitely OK—so long as some conditions are met.

But you yourself find it hard to decide whether this one was right, or wrong, or perhaps somehow somewhere in-between.

It was mostly a remarkable and enjoyable experience (with some slightly yuck moments toward the end). If it were not for the ethical concerns, you certainly wouldn’t regret it.

More importantly, you think, its lasting consequences were mainly good. Your lover was quite different in bed from anyone you had been with, and you learned to be more open when making love yourself. That has improved sex in your marriage; your spouse is happy about that.

On the other hand, if you had been caught, it would have hurt several people besides you. Putting innocents at risk must be part of the moral equation.

And there is another lasting effect. You aren’t sure if it is good or bad. Your affair confirmed that something important is missing in your marriage—something you will never get from your spouse. Before, you suspected; now you know. Now, you cannot un-know that.

That is bad for the marriage; but maybe it is good for you. Maybe even for your spouse, in the long run.

You cannot help wondering about other possibilities. Is it realistic to want lasting passion and compatibility?

You do not want to become a serial adulterer in an attempt to find out.

Ethics: what are they good for?

You are introduced to a rather odd woman at a cocktail party. She is deathly pale, with a black leather miniskirt and extensive, spiky tattoos. She sounds normal enough, though, and explains that she teaches philosophy at a local university.

“Oh? That’s interesting,” you say. “What kind of philosophy?”

“Well, um, ethics, actually.”

“Ah,” you say. “Um—I wonder if I could ask you a professional question?”

“Well, if you want personal advice—” she begins, frowning.

“No, sorry! Not like that. You see, I got really interested in ethics recently. I kind of geeked out on it, actually. I read a bunch on the web, and then a couple books. So I learned all about virtue ethics and deontology and consequentialism and stuff. But what I don’t understand is how you would use all that to figure out what to do in a real-life ethical quandary. It seems awfully abstract.”

“Oh dear,” she says, grinning. “You have discovered our dirty little secret.”

“What?”

“Well, you know, most ethicists have the same problem. Our professional work usually isn’t much help when ethical push comes to practical shove.”

“Oh,” you say.

“How does that make you feel?”

You call your friend Susie. After some small talk, you come around to the point. “Susie—I’m not sure how to ask this, but—you remember you told me once about a therapist who was helpful to you?”

She laughs. “Yes, of course. After my first was born—”

“Sam,” you remember.

“Right, Sam. Can you believe he’s in second grade now? Anyway, I had post-partum depression, and Janet was really helpful. Are you OK? Do you want me to give you her number?”

“Yeah, I’m OK, I think. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with me—”

“You don’t have to be crazy to see a therapist, you know!”

“Yeah, I know. But what I remember is your saying that everything seemed meaningless. And—”

“I had all these expectations about what being a mother would be like. And the reality wasn’t anything like that. She helped me figure out how I felt about that.”

“Right, so I’m kind of wondering what something in my life means, I mean meant, so I thought—”

“Sure, of course. Hang on and I’ll look her up. If I can just figure out how this damn phone works…”

Talking with the therapist doesn’t go as smoothly.

“How does that make you feel?” is her mantra. After answering that dozens of times, over several sessions, you finally rebel. “I know how it makes me feel. What I want to know is what it means.”

“Well, what does it mean to you?” she asks.

“But that’s just it,” you say. “I want to know what it actually means. Not just to me. I mean, meaning isn’t just a feeling. Ethics can’t be like that. Some things are just right or wrong, no matter what you feel about them.”

“That seems like quite a polarizing view,” the therapist says. “Maybe things aren’t so black and white… I see our hour is almost up. Next time, perhaps it would be helpful for you to tell me about your parent’s marriage.”

You decide there won’t be a next time.

Meaningness is not mostly ethics

Ethics, you realize, couldn’t answer the question “what did that mean?” anyway. Even if you could be sure whether the affair was right or wrong, the one word “right” or “wrong” would hardly begin to express the meaning of the relationship. Even an explanation of why it was right or wrong would still ignore most of what seemed to matter about it.

The meaning of the affair seems to have many dimensions besides ethics. Yet you find it hard to say what those would be.

Certainly, how you feel about it is another dimension. And how your former lover feels too.

But what it says about you seems more important. You didn’t think you were the sort of person who would cheat—and you still don’t. But apparently you are—because you did.

What else does that imply about you? Are you less trust-worthy than you thought, in other ways?

You felt, in the initial rush, that you had no choice. You tried as hard as you could, you thought, to resist your feelings, and failed. Could you have done differently? Is it just sleazy self-justification to say that you would have had to have been a different person to have chosen differently—and that it is not possible to be anyone other than you are?

But now, in fact, you are not the same person you were. The affair changed you; and that is another dimension of its meaning. Your risk-loving lover gave you a confidence you did not have before. And the affair exposed parts of yourself you were only vaguely aware of. Now those often come into play as you think and feel and relate.

Beyond all that, you suspect there are dimensions of meaning that transcend the personal; that go beyond the effects on anyone involved.

Marriage is a sacrament, according to the Church. It is a contract with God as well as another person. You don’t exactly believe in God any more… but marriage doesn’t seem to just be an agreement between two people, either. Maybe it is society, not God, to whom you are responsible? Marriage is a foundation of society. But whose business is it what you do, if it has no consequences for them?

Besides which, the affair itself seemed at first to have a sacred dimension. Sometimes, making love, the sense that you were separate people dropped away. There was simply intense sensation and exquisite action—with no one there to feel or act. And then sometimes it seemed that it was the entire universe making love. Awareness extended into infinity, and there was the presence of the God you don’t believe in.

But surely that was an illusion. This is just self-justification, isn’t it? It makes no sense at all to talk of self-indulgent pleasure as sacred.

A life lesson

During the affair, you told no one. It was a private thing, just for you and your lover. But now, needing perspective, you confide in two close friends.

Over lunch, you tell Chris the short version. You want to be clear that you are not looking for sympathy or support or advice. You need help figuring out what it meant.

“It’s a life lesson,” says Chris. “The universe always sends you the exact experiences you need to develop your true self. It’s the way you find out what you were really meant to do.”

“But what’s the lesson, then?” you ask. “What am I supposed to do?”

“That’s up to you,” says Chris. “You are totally responsible for your own reality, you know. But you have to use your intuition. I think you think too much, sometimes. I mean, really, reading philosophy books is not going to help you find the meaning of an affair! If you go deeply into your feelings, you will find the answer. Maybe that’s the lesson, in itself!”

Lunch ends a little awkwardly. Chris has fit your experience to a generic spiritual story. Nothing in it takes account of any of the details, of the complex texture of your relationships and your life. What you want to know about is the meaning of your affair, not about meaning in general. You are a bit annoyed that Chris doesn’t understand, or is ignoring what you care about; and you can’t completely hide it. Chris always was a bit of an airhead, you think. In retrospect, not the right person to consult.

You are aware that Chris, in turn, is a bit annoyed, because you are dismissing valuable spiritual insight. You seem excessively skeptical, materialistic, and self-involved.

There is an unspoken agreement: “we won’t talk about this again—and we’ll avoid other topics that would expose our different takes on life.”

Life is for living

You meet Kim for drinks after work. Kim is sensible, and you know won’t get mystical on you.

At first, the discussion seems to go well. Unlike Chris, Kim wants to know about the details. Exactly what was so great about the sex? Where did you go on dates? How did you keep the secret?

After an hour, you start again to be a bit frustrated. What you want to know is what it meant. The details matter—but not every detail matters. It would take a year to tell the total story of a year-long affair; and then what? The story itself is not what matters; it is what it means.

“Why does it have to ‘mean’ something?” asks Kim. “Why can’t you just let it be what it was?”

“Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?” you say. “What was it?”

“It’s just life,” says Kim. “Life is for living, I guess.”

“What does that mean?” you ask. “That’s what I want to know—how should I live life?”

“You mean, like, is it wrong to have an affair?” asks Kim.

“Well, that’s part of it,” you say.

“Geez, I don’t know,” says Kim. “I guess you only get one life, and the point is to enjoy it. So you have to look out for yourself, and get what you want, some of the time. And, of course, you have to have some kind of ethics. But no harm, no fault. Anyway, it’s over now—why worry about it?”

You nod agreement, but silently you think: That seems too easy.

“So when you did it in the stairwell at Chez Jean’s, were you, like, standing against the wall, or lying down on the landing, or what?” asks Kim.

What kind of world is this?

Neither of your friends’ views was helpful. Chris has a big-picture theory of meaning, which probably came out of some self-help book, but it doesn’t seem to explain anything about your affair. Kim isn’t interested in any meaning beyond the mundane and obvious.

Neither view seems exactly wrong, but both seem to miss what is important. You wonder if somehow they could be combined. Is there a way to understand meaning that takes account of both the big picture and the details?

To be useful, a big picture story has to help make sense of specifics. But, it occurs to you, the meaning of the specifics says a lot about what the big picture has to be.

The world is a very different place depending on whether your affair was definitely wrong (or right), or if that is just a personal opinion—or a cultural agreement.

The world is a very different place depending on whether “the universe” sends you ideal life lessons, or “the universe” is some rocks and gas scattered through vast empty space.

The world is a very different place depending on whether you could have chosen not to begin the affair, or if (being who you are) you could not have acted differently.

The world is a very different place depending on whether somehow the meaning of the affair could become perfectly clear—or if it was inherently nebulous.

Meaningfulness and meaninglessness

No accounting for the vagaries of coke machines

Some things are meaningful; some are meaningless. Some are vaguely in-between.

This is our constant, natural experience in everyday life. It is only in religion, spirituality, and philosophy that people insist that everything is meaningful, or that nothing is.

Insisting that everything is meaningful is eternalism. Insisting that nothing is meaningful is nihilism.

Eternalism and nihilism are the simplest confused stances. Understanding what is wrong with them, and how the complete stance avoids their confusion, is key to the rest of this book.

Everyday examples

Some experiences are pretty much meaningless. This is true even when they have a positive or negative effect on you.

Your usual bus left two minutes late; the Coke machine mistakenly gave you an extra coin in change; you spilled some of it on your shirt.

So what? Such things just happen. They don’t happen for any particular reason; they’re effectively random. They don’t have any implications beyond their immediate, small effect on you. They don’t tell you anything about yourself or about the universe, beyond the obvious.

You go for a hike alone in the desert, and your arm gets trapped between two rocks. You cannot free it, and after waiting several days for an improbable rescue, you realize you have the choice of cutting off your own arm with a dull knife, or dying of thirst.

Although an accident, this is a meaningful choice. If you survive, you will remember it as a meaningful experience. Though it was an entirely personal adventure, with no direct effect on anyone else, millions of other people are likely to find it meaningful as well.

We speak of “major life events”—marriage; giving birth; death of parent, child, or spouse; life-threatening illness; financial triumph or catastrophe. These are experiences most people would agree were highly meaningful.

So what?

Some things are more meaningful than others, evidently. You might say that meaningfulness and meaninglessness are a matter of degree, not either/or.

That’s not quite right, either, though. In many cases, it is difficult to say how meaningful an event was. This might not be a problem with knowing how meaningful it was, but an inherent nebulosity of the situation itself.

None of this is mysterious, or should be controversial. In fact, in ordinary circumstances, probably everyone would agree.

Still, there are situations that make it tempting to say that everything is meaningful, or that nothing is. These situations give rise to eternalism and nihilism. The rest of this chapter explains why these temptations arise, why we should resist them, and how.

Extreme examples, eternalism and nihilism

Many people believe in UFOs because they make life meaningful

Why would anyone want to claim that everything is meaningful, or that everything is meaningless, defying our everyday experience that some things are meaningful and some not?

Here I’ll give an example of extreme meaninglessness, and one of extreme meaningfulness. Because it is difficult to deny their meaninglessness and meaningfulness, these help uncover the reasons people might want to do that.

Fear of meaninglessness motivates eternalism

A tiny gray pebble slides half an inch down a slope on a lifeless planet a million light-years from the nearest star. No being ever knows about this, and nothing happens as a result of it.

If anything is meaningless, this is it. So why on earth would you claim this must be meaningful? Only if it is important that absolutely everything is meaningful. And why would that be?

This insistence is motivated by fear: the fear that perhaps everything is meaningless.

If we could definitely say which things are meaningful and which are meaningless, there would be no problem. The meaninglessness of the pebble’s slide would not threaten the meaningfulness of our own lives.

But we cannot always say what has meaning and what does not. We have no hard-line test. Meaningfulness is frustratingly unreliable; transient, uncertain.

There are clues. In everyday experience, it seems that things are meaningful only if they are meaningful to someone. And, mostly things are meaningful only if they have some effect, positive or negative, on someone. The pebble’s slide is meaningless because it fails those tests.

But what about your own life? Things happen that seem meaningful to you. But often they do not seem meaningful to other people—especially if they affect only you. And it is certainly possible to be mistaken about meaningfulness—to suppose things have meanings that they don’t. So isn’t it possible that you are entirely mistaken about meaningfulness? Isn’t it possible that life itself is completely meaningless? That is a profoundly depressing idea.

“Nonsense,” you think. “I know that my life is meaningful to me.” But what good is that? No one else cares about your life the way you do. Maybe your supposed “meaningfulness” is a delusion. Maybe it is purely subjective, and exists only in your own mind. And then, so what? That seems like a meaningless kind of “meaning.”

This is a slippery slope you don’t want to slide down. Since there seem to be no definite criteria for meaningfulness, you cannot rely on anything to have meaning. There is no solid ground under foot, once you admit the nebulosity of meaningness.

Better to stick a stake in the ground at the top of the hill. If everything is meaningful, then there is no need to sort out what is or isn’t. There is no need to grapple with ambiguity and uncertainty. There is a reliable foundation on which you can build a meaningful life.

This is the stance of eternalism. Eternalism provides a reassuring firmness, certainty, definiteness to meaning. It says: you are right to care about what you do, because it is truly meaningful.

But what makes everything meaningful? What could give meaning to the pebble?

Here, you must invoke a Cosmic Plan. There has to be a universe-spanning intelligence that knows everything, and that gives everything meaning. (What meaning? That is not always for humans to know.)

The supposed meaningfulness of the pebble and the Cosmic Plan are mutually reinforcing. The pebble couldn’t be meaningful without the Cosmic Plan. If seemingly meaningless things were not really meaningful, the Cosmic Plan would have no work to do, and we would have no reason to imagine it.

Since usually things are meaningful only to someone, who likes or dislikes them, you might personalize the Cosmic Plan. God is the “someone” to whom all things are meaningful, and whose preferences gives positive or negative value to all things.

Fear of excessive meaning motivates nihilism

A gigantic spaceship arrives. Astonishingly beautiful aliens emerge, and announce that they are on a diplomatic mission from the Universal Federation of a billion planets.

Humankind, they explain, has reached the point of sophistication where we can join the Federation. We will not, however, join as junior partners. Human beings have a unique spiritual ability not found anywhere else in the universe. This ability is latent in us now, but can easily be developed with tools the aliens will provide.

Unfortunately, the entire universe, with its billions of inhabited planets, will be destroyed just a few years from now. A tiny flaw in the fabric of reality is about to spread across the universe in an instant, like a pin-prick in a balloon, and the whole of space-time will evaporate.

Only the specially-developed spiritual abilities of human beings can prevent this.

The aliens will make us immortal and vastly more intelligent than any human has ever been—a necessary prerequisite to this spiritual development. Naturally, this will make us radically different from the way we were; we will no longer be human.

Having saved the universe, humanity will lead all other intelligent species to a triumphant destiny, a culmination of the ultimate purpose of existence that is now utterly inconceivable.

However, since the aliens do not wish to force anyone to do anything, it is up to us to decide whether to undergo the transformation.

This is a meaningful choice. The fate of the universe, and billions of billions of beings, hangs in the balance.

Suddenly, your nagging back ache, your promotion review at work, and the credit card company’s screw-up that is causing all kinds of havoc—all highly meaningful yesterday—seem totally meaningless. Political parties, religious differences, wars, economics, favorite songs—even these become meaningless by comparison.

The only way to say “this choice would not really be meaningful” is to insist that, no matter how many beings are affected, the apparent meaning is still just subjective. It’s only in the minds of a bunch of random life-forms, who are (after all) just blobs of matter; swirls of subatomic particles. Therefore, it is illusory.

Implicit here again is the view that real meaningfulness could only be objective, and could only be provided by something external to the universe. There is no Cosmic Plan, so nothing is truly meaningful.

This is the stance of nihilism. Nihilism’s improbable insistence on meaninglessness is also motivated by fear. It is the mirror-image fear of eternalism.

The fear is that, if you admit anything is meaningful, then perhaps everything has a fixed meaning—or at least everything in your life.

You don’t want the responsibility of dealing with the intricacies, implications, and imperatives of all that meaningfulness. And if everything had a specific meaning, there would be no room for creativity. You would have no freedom.

Perhaps worst of all, you might have to accept a lot of sentimental claptrap—the nonsense eternalists spout in a desperate attempt to justify their delusions.

Meaningness without a Cosmic Plan

Eternalism and nihilism exist only out of fear of each other. There is a better alternative—what I call the complete stance.

I suggest that meaningfulness is not provided by a Cosmic Plan. There is no Cosmic Plan; but that does not mean that nothing is meaningful.

I suggest that some things are meaningful, and some things are not. That is true even though we have no definite criteria to decide which is which.

I suggest that meaningness is neither objective, nor subjective.

Accepting these suggestions allows you to let go of the unrealistic fears that motivate both eternalism and nihilism.

This complete view of meaningness has its own implications. They may seem to make life more complicated. However, the complete stance also eliminates the many troubles eternalism and nihilism cause.

So how does meaningness work?

Machinery

This far into the book, you may be impatient. I’ve said a lot about how meaningness doesn’t work. But how does it work? I have said almost nothing, other than that it is nebulous. How unsatisfactory!

I would love to tell you exactly what meaning is. I’d love to explain Life, The Universe, and Everything in a way that solves all your problems.

Unfortunately, I can’t—and neither can anyone else. That sucks; but this is the actual situation we are in.

We have a choice of explanations of meaningness: ones that are simple, clear, harmful, and wrong; or ones that are complex, vague, helpful, and approximately right. I prefer the latter.

It seems to me that:

  • No one can say quite how meaning works.
  • Theories that pretend to explain are either eternalist or nihilist, and both are wrong and harmful.1
  • We aren’t likely to get a full explanation any time soon.
  • We can’t wait for a perfect understanding of meaning, because we have to live life now.
  • So we have to accept that our understanding is incomplete, and do the best we can. Life is fired at us point-blank;2 issues of ethics and purpose won’t wait for someone to find a perfect theory.
  • We can form a partial understanding of meaningness. We are not entirely ignorant, and vague understanding is better than none.
  • Incomplete understanding is not a huge obstacle to sensible action—which is another reason waiting for a perfect theory would be senseless.

This book will, eventually, say a lot about how meaningness works. Some of that will be intuitive and impressionistic. I hope understanding will accumulate as you read brief partial explanations, and examples in passing.

Some other discussions will be quite technical; perhaps most readers will want to skip over those. In any case, I am postponing most into the chapter on monism and dualism, which develops some necessary concepts.

But here’s a preview.

The natural human view is that meanings are inherent in external things. Thunder means the gods are angry, and that’s a fact about thunder and gods, not about people. So on this view, meanings are objective: external to us. They are the same for everyone.

When “same for everyone” ran into differences of opinion, monotheism moved all meanings into God instead. God gives everything ultimate meanings, that no one may disagree with. God is external, so monotheistic meaning is also objective.

Then God died, and the world was disenchanted, so objects all became inherently meaningless dead matter. That meant meanings can’t be objective. The obvious alternative—developed in the 1700s—was that meanings are subjective. They live in the minds of individual people.

250 years later, versions of this idea are still taken for granted by most sophisticated people. Unfortunately, the subjective theory of meaning doesn’t work. It verges on nihilism—outright denial of all meaning. Fortunately, the theory is also not true.

When you are hungry, the meaning of food is not subjective. You, personally, are hungry, but the meaning is shared with everyone else (and probably all other vertebrate animals). It’s not particularly “mental”; it’s as much in your sensory organs, and digestive system, as in your brain. And it’s in the actions of your hands and mouth as you eat.

The meaning of a handshake is partly arbitrary, but it is not subjective. You can’t redefine it to make it mean what you want. When you shake hands, the meaning depends on a huge amount of cultural background, involving millions of people. It probably also depends on evolved biological functions we don’t know much about.

The subjective theory of meaning is not full-blown nihilism, but tends to slide into it. That’s because we actually can’t mean anything much by ourselves; meaning is mostly a social and cultural activity. Narrowing one’s focus to supposedly personal meanings leads to social and cultural alienation, and then to nihilistic depression.

A meaning is neither subjective nor objective; it is not inside your mind, nor outside. It requires both subjects and objects, and it doesn’t dwell in either. It takes time and space, but it is not precisely located.

Especially, a meaning does not live in your brain. That popular pseudoscientific idea is the “representational theory of mind.” It is internally contradictory and unworkable. Meaning may require a brain, but usually many brains, and also non-brain stuff.

Meaningness is a dynamic, interactive process. Any particular meaning involves a complicated history of many creatures and things; a network of involvement that we only ever partly understand.

A meaning always appears nebulous to us, because we never know everything about it. This is, in philosophical terms, a epistemological fact: about us. I believe that meanings are also actually nebulous. That is an ontological theory, about meaningness. I’ll discuss this technically, later in the book. However, epistemological nebulosity is enough for practical purposes.

We have to live as if meaningness is nebulous, whether it ultimately is or not. This book is about how.

  • 1. Eternalist theories pretend to have detailed understandings that are, in fact, mistaken. Acting on these wrong understandings has bad results—as you’d expect. Nihilist theories suggest that, since full understanding is impossible, we should pretend that everything is meaningless. That would allow us to evade responsibility for our lives; but we can’t actually get away with that, either.
  • 2. “We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness: it is always urgent, ‘here and now,’ without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank.” —Jose Ortega y Gasset

Schematic overview: meaningness

This table summarizes three stances one can take to the most fundamental questions of meaning.

For an introduction to these stances, see “Preview: eternalism and nihilism.” The main discussion begins here.

The meanings of the rows in this table are explained in “The psychological anatomy of a stance.”

Stance Eternalism Nihilism Meaning/ness
Summary Everything is given a fixed meaning by an eternal ordering principle (Cosmic Plan) Nothing is really meaningful Meaning is nebulous, yet patterned; meaningfulness and meaninglessness intermingle
What it denies Nebulosity; meaninglessness Pattern; meaningfulness
What it fixates Meaning Meaninglessness
The sales pitch You are guaranteed a good outcome if you follow the rules You don’t have to care!
Don’t get fooled again
Accurate understanding of meaningness allows both freedom and purpose
Emotional appeal Certainty; understanding; control. Reassurance that if you act in accordance with Cosmic Plan, everything will be well. Intelligence. Also, nothing means anything, so not getting what you want is not a problem.
Pattern of thinking Deliberate stupidity; sentimentality; self-righteousness Contempt; rage; intellectualization; depression; anxiety Joyful realism
Likely next stances Mission Materialism
Accomplishment Unify your self with Cosmic Plan Total apathy Wizardry
How it causes suffering Action based on imagined meanings fails; narrowed scope for action; Cosmic Plan makes insane, harmful demands Have to blind self to meaningfulness; undermines any practical action
Obstacles to maintaining the stance Difficulty of blinding oneself to manifestations of nebulosity, and submitting to Cosmic Plan Difficulty of blinding self to manifestations of pattern, and abandoning all desires Unappealing due to complexity and uncertainty
Antidotes; counter-thoughts Curiosity; realism; intelligence; enjoyment of nebulosity, meaninglessness, un-knowing Enjoyment of pattern; recovery of passion
Intelligent aspect There is meaning, and it is not merely subjective, so nihilism is wrong There are no inherent, objective, or eternal meanings, so eternalism is wrong
Positive appropriation after resolution Respect for pattern is a compassionate aspect of realism Recognition of nebulosity is a wisdom aspect of nihilism; nearly-correct understanding of defects of eternalism

Eternalism: the fixation of meaning

Kitschy romantic postcard image

Eternalism is the stance that everything has a fixed, clear-cut meaning. That’s an attractive fantasy, but it inevitably runs into the reality that meaningness is nebulous: variable, vague, and context-dependent. That collision can cause serious trouble.

This section provides tools for noticing when you have assumed the eternalist stance; for seeing how it is harmful; and for shifting into the complete stance instead.

If you haven’t already read “Preview: eternalism and nihilism” in the book’s introduction, you may want to do that first.

Eternalism is wrong and harmful, yet appealing

It’s obvious that many things are meaningless, and most meanings are somewhat vague. In other words, we all know that eternalism is wrong. We’re only tempted to adopt eternalism at times when meaninglessness or ambiguity is emotionally threatening. (See “Extreme examples” for a preview.)

Since it’s obviously wrong, I won’t argue against eternalism in detail. That would not be particularly helpful. We always already know it’s mistaken, and yet we fall into it anyway. (If you are committed to an eternalist system, I send good wishes, and suggest that you won’t find this book to your taste.)

Even if you specifically reject eternalism, you will find that you adopt it at times, unwittingly. (Or I do, anyway!) This is particularly true for those who waver in their relationship with eternalism. That includes agnostics, spiritual seekers, and miscellaneous “other”s who remain uncommitted to any stance.

Understanding why we are vulnerable to eternalism is the first step toward avoiding it. These emotional dynamics are independent of specific beliefs or commitments. I’ll start with a funny story about a time I got suckered by eternalism. Then I’ll explain more generally its emotional appeal.

Then I’ll point out ways it fails to deliver on its emotional promises, and causes harm and suffering. This can be hard to accept, because eternalism seems to offer hope, solace, purpose, ethical certainty, and all manner of other desirable meaning-goods. It promises control over your life—but cannot deliver. Seeing through this deceptive game lets you escape playing it.

Eternalism depends on a series of ploys to make it seem plausible. These are tricks we play on ourselves, and each other, to avoid seeing eternalism’s failures. I will explain how to recognize and disarm each of these tactics.

This is (mostly) not about religion

Religions—especially fundamentalist ones—are the most obvious forms of eternalism. However, eternalism is more basic than religion, or any other system. It’s not about specific beliefs; it is a fundamental attitude to meaningness. It can show up unaccompanied by any conceptual system. It can show up in non-ideological popular attitudes to meaning—for example, in idealized conceptions of romance, illustrated at the top of this page.

So, although parts of my discussion of eternalism may sound similar to familiar criticisms of religion, it applies to atheists, skeptics, and rationalists too. We are not immune. Dropping religious beliefs is only a first step towards freeing ourselves from eternalism.

Political ideologies—especially extremist ones—insist on fixed meanings. So do various other systems, including some brands of rationalism, psychotherapy, scientism, and so on. The final part of this chapter discusses these non-theistic forms of eternalism.

I get duped by eternalism in a casino

Gambling addiction trades on the illusion that winning is meaningful

I’ll begin with a story about a time I fell under the spell of eternalism, with ridiculous results.

Then, I’ll draw some serious conclusions about the way eternalism works.

How I discovered The Ultimate Meaning Of Being

The point of gambling was lost on me.

I am not especially risk-averse. As a businessman, I often made decisions in which millions of dollars, and the survival of the enterprise, were at stake. Nowadays, I pursue outdoor sports in which death is a definite possibility.

On the other hand, I do not enjoy risk for its own sake. I see no point in taking risks unless the expected rewards are greater.

The puzzling thing about casino gambling is that it has “negative expected value.” Over time, gamblers almost always lose more money than they make. In fact, the modern conceptual framework for “rational action” was invented to explain why gambling is a bad idea. So what’s the point?

A decade ago, I started passing through Reno airport regularly, and sometimes spent the night in hotels there. They all have enormous casinos on the ground floor, laid out so that you cannot avoid walking past innumerable flashing, blooping slot machines on the way to your room.

Being curious about human motivations, I used to watch the gamblers, trying to figure out what they were feeling.

I had some guesses; but I thought I ought to try betting, to see if I could experience the same thing. My guess was that I couldn’t. It seemed likely that gamblers gambled because they were stupid, or did not understand negative expectation value, or had some sort of superstitious belief that they were special, so randomness did not apply. I couldn’t adopt their wrong beliefs, so I wouldn’t be able to have the experience they did.

I had also heard it said that you can only understand gambling by wagering a sum large enough that losing it would be a serious problem for you. I wanted to understand, but not that badly.

Applying rational decision theory, I resolved to obtain as much information as I could at the least possible expected cost. (That strategy is automatic for me.) I looked for the lowest-stakes slot machine, and found one that would let me bet a single cent on each round.

So I fed it a dollar—the least it would accept—and pulled the handle. I immediately won five cents. And ten cents on the next try! Then several losses in a row.

I upped my bet from one to five cents—and won again.

As I consistently won more than I lost, I was gradually suffused with a warm glow. I felt safe and at home in the world. What a blessed relief!

I realized that the universe loved me, and that everything was going to come out well after all. My ever-present nagging sense of vague wrongness disappeared, and I recognized that it had always been a misunderstanding. Everything is as it should be; everything is connected; everything makes sense; everything is benevolently watched over by the eternal ordering principle.

This was eternalism straight-up, purely at a bodily, felt level.

I’m disposed to nihilism; so, at the same time, I was running a sardonic mental commentary. The cognitive dissonance between feeling unquestioned confidence in the All-Good Cosmic Plan, and my intellectual confidence that casino operators ensure that their slot machines are a losing bet, was extremely funny. That humorousness fed back into my bodily enjoyment.

It didn’t take long to conclude that I had gained all the knowledge I had asked for, and far more. The universe, in its infinite generosity, had gifted me with profound insight. To finish the charade, I increased my bet to 25 cents, and then 50 cents.

I walked back toward my hotel room grinning like the village idiot, unspeakably happy.

As I entered the elevator, a sexy lady jumped in with me.

“Lucky night?” she asked.

(It dawned on me only as I was writing this that she was a professional. I’m kind of clueless about such things. A guy in a suit, leaving a casino floor accompanied only by a gigantic grin, is surely a fine business opportunity.)

“No!” I exclaimed, beaming. “At one point I was up by thirty-seven cents, but in the end I lost the whole dollar!”

Her face closed; she turned away, and wouldn’t look at me for the rest of the elevator ride.

There’s something wrong with anyone who’s that excited about thirty-seven cents.

Eternalism is an addiction

Actually, winning thirty-seven cents was not going to make a such a big difference in my life.

Discovering universal love would. That was a really great feeling. Experiencing that all the time—the way some mystics supposedly do—would be fabulous.

That sense of safety, understanding, and certainty could be addictive. I think that’s part of why we all frequently fall into the eternalist stance—even when we know better.

Eternalism feels right—absolutely right. And when we lose it, we’ll do almost anything to get it back. We’ll pretend not to see obvious randomness, and take up arms to destroy evidence of it.

Eternalism and patternicity

Patternicity1 is the brain’s built-in tendency to perceive patterns that don’t exist. An example is the experience of seeing a face in the light and dark patches on a rock, or splotch of paint, or piece of toast. It’s often impossible to not-see them, even when you are undeceived, and know perfectly well there’s no face there.

Eternalism is patternicity for broad dimensions of meaning—purpose, value, ethics—rather than physical objects. Our brains seem to have evolved to find patterns of meaning, too. In the casino, the intellectual understanding that my feelings were ridiculous did not make them any less profound. Runs of unexpected good or bad luck trigger the eternalist stance automatically.

Meaningness is not merely subjective

Some claim that meanings are merely subjective: matters of personal opinion, or at most cultural conventions. Unfortunately, this slides rapidly into nihilism. Fortunately, meanings are not merely subjective. I will explain both this in detail later in the book, but:

If meaningness was merely subjective, it would not be possible to be wrong about it. However, my felt beliefs about meaning, in the grip of a run of good luck, were definitely outright wrong.

Eternalism and dopamine

The joy of winning, patternicity, addiction, mania, and religion are all connected by the neurotransmitter dopamine.2 Dopamine plays a key role in motivation and reward. It spikes in response to unexpected success, and is experienced as pleasurable and energizing.

Dopamine reinforces your discovery of a valuable connection, with a new practical understanding of the world. It’s your brain telling you you finally got things right, for once—so pay attention, remember this, and do it again!

Random gambling wins are unexpected, and therefore cause dopamine release. Unfortunately, that increases patternicity, because the brain treats dopamine as evidence of insight. Gamblers typically believe in “luck” as something that comes and goes, and “streaks” of wins or losses that they can detect. When “on a winning streak,” they expect it to continue; but they also believe a losing streak must be balanced by future winnings. Either way, perceptions of non-existent patterns keep them playing.

Stimulant drugs, such as nicotine, cocaine, and speed, raise dopamine levels, mimicking the reward effect of unexpected success. Stimulant addiction and gambling addiction are, therefore, believed to work in much the same way.

Mania—the “up” phase of manic depression—is similar to an cocaine high, and may also be dopamine-mediated.3,4

Hyper-religiosity is common in mania. The manic feels full of cosmic realization, spiritual vision, confidence, and charisma. Many religious leaders probably experience stable hypomania—the only mildly-delusional form that doesn’t interfere much with life.

Eternalism straight-up

Eternalism is most obvious in systems that reinforce it with concepts. For example, Christianity reinforces eternalism with beliefs about God, who makes everything meaningful.

My slot-machine experience was eternalism straight-up, with no conceptual framework. God was not in the picture, because I’m a life-long atheist, and thirty-seven cents was not enough to change my mind about Him. Probably if I had believed in God, my mental commentary would have been about my relationship with Him, though.

Instead, I had just a vague feeling about my relationship with the Non-Me. When I say I felt that “the universe loves me,” this did not involve any concept of “the universe” as a thing; rather, a vague omnidirectional feeling of being loved.

Eternalism and systems

It’s easy to see how experiences similar to mine in the casino (but more intense or frequent) can grow into eternalist systems. Put a name on the feeling, make up some theories about it, and you’ve founded a religion, self-help movement, or alternative therapy. Your vague certainty that everything now makes sense justifies your metaphysical speculations.

Established eternalist systems can also co-opt such experiences, and use them to reinforce their conceptual dogmas. Whenever someone feels something like I did, the system’s representative can say “Yes! You got it! That was God’s love / psychological integration / enlightenment / healing energy / etc.

And when, inevitably, it dissipates, he or she will tell you what you need to do to get it back. Eternalist systems relentlessly exploit this addictive dynamic.

Critics of eternalist systems usually attack their beliefs. False beliefs are mostly not what make eternalism compelling, though—it’s the emotional dynamics. Addiction is only one of those.

To free yourself, or others, from eternalism, addressing the emotional dynamics is even more important than refuting concepts.

Eternalism makes you miserable

Unfortunately, we can’t experience unexpected success very often; we’d come to expect it. Trying to prolong the dopamine high usually makes you miserable instead.

Gamblers almost all lose money in the long run. Coming off of cocaine is depressing. Then it takes bigger and bigger doses to get you equally high, with increasingly nasty side-effects. Mania ends in crippling depression.

Eternalism also always lets you down. It seems to offer hope and solace, but in the end it always runs into the brick wall of reality. Then, when it’s impossible to ignore nebulosity, you feel abandoned by the eternal ordering principle. That’s the profoundest possible betrayal.

Even nihilism feels better at such times.

And so, automatically, we swing back and forth between the two.

  • 1. More formally, patternicity is called “apophenia.”
  • 2. This is according to current neuroscience, which is always subject to revision. I think the connection between gambling, patternicity, addiction, mania, and eternalism holds regardless of the mechanism.
  • 3. The science of this isn’t yet clear, as of 2013. Other neurotransmitters are also involved.
  • 4. Depression is closely connected with nihilism, just as hypomania is connected with eternalism. Depressives experience below-average patternicity, and diminished pleasure and motivation from unexpected successes.

The appeal of eternalism

Smarmy guy

Eternalism is the most attractive of all stances.1 It’s simple and easy to understand. It promises everything you could want from meaning: certainty, safety, understanding, and control. It offers solid ground; a foundation on which you can build a meaningful life.

Eternalism guarantees that everything is under control, meaningness-wise. Meanings are clear and fixed; they won’t slide out from under you. Ethics won’t change with fashion; your purpose in life won’t suddenly become pointless; you are not going turn into someone other than the person you truly are and have always been.

If you play your part in the Cosmic Plan, everything will be well. You are guaranteed a good outcome if you follow the rules. Even when your life seems to be a chaotic disaster, even when you doubt whether it means anything—even then, it is all part of the Cosmic Plan, and there is nothing to worry about. Conflict and uncertainty, all sorts of messiness about meaning—these are only illusions.

  • 1. Eternalism seems also to be the most biologically natural stance. Something like it is automatic; our brains just go there by default. See the discussions of patternicity earlier, and magical thinking later. More precisely, the innate human worldview is probably animism, which is not quite eternalistic. Animism makes everything meaningful, but does not make explicit that everything is meaningful—which is part of my understanding of eternalism.

The promise of certainty

Certainty: the mythical holy grail

What we want most from meaning is guarantees.

Life is nebulous: chaotic, risky, and confusing. Efforts that should work fail. The good suffer and wrong-doers prosper. The world does not make sense. Each of us is torn by uncertainties, conflicting desires, and impossible decisions.

We want assurance that this is all just an illusion. We want to hear that the real world is—somehow—orderly and consistently meaningful. We want answers—sometimes desperately.

Eternalism promises to deliver those answers, and to guarantee them. It cannot; and so it lies.

Eternalism pretends to offer certainty. It pretends that behind apparent chaos, there is a perfect pattern that explains everything. It pretends to end all doubt, and the suffering, confusion, and anxiety that comes with it.

Eternalism can be exhilarating! It cannot deliver accurate answers, but it can deliver a feeling of certainty—temporarily. You adopt the eternalist stance by blinding yourself to nebulosity; by pretending not to see contradictions.

It’s a huge relief, an occasion of joy, to set aside all doubts. Adopting eternalism frees all the energy that was tied up by internal divisions; power struggles within the self.1 Certainty about life-purpose and ethics ends confusion about what to do and how to live; full of confidence, you can make rapid progress in life.

Eternalism is now typically packaged in systems. Sometimes raw eternalism can provide certainty without specifics—as in my casino experience. Usually, though, we need a web of justifications, of canned answers, to not-see nebulosity. That’s what ideologies—religions, political theories, secular cults—provide. These justifications frequently fail, when nebulosity contradicts them.

When the fantasy of absolute answers is threatened by evidence, eternalism responds with various psychological ploys. These include, for instance, suppressing dissenting thoughts, physically removing yourself from contradictory situations, kitschy sentimentality, blind faith, mystification, and arming yourself against perception.

Eternalism is at its most glorious in a conversion experience, during the honeymoon after you have first committed to a system. That can last for a few weeks to a few years; for as long as you can silence your internal voices of doubt. Eventually it becomes impossible to not-see the evidence against the system. You may remain committed, but it can only be a wavering commitment. The honeymoon turns into a warm memory, cherished on Sunday mornings but increasingly distant from everyday experience.

Alternatively, seeking renewed certainty, you may search for a new system. Some people become serial conversion junkies. But as with opiate addiction, it becomes harder and harder to recreate the first high. And the periods of doubt between commitments, like heroin withdrawal, turn increasingly into nihilistic anxiety and despair. This pattern was particularly common in the California Bay Area in the late 20th century. It afflicted many of my friends, and that was my initial motivation to write this book. Since I started writing, more than a decade ago, new patterns have emerged—but they are no less dysfunctional.

In the 21st century West, there are hundreds of competing eternalist systems. Although they all have the same fundamental stance toward meaning, and the same emotional dynamics, they disagree sharply about specifics. This adds to the chaos and confusion that eternalism tries to dispel. Further, there is widespread understanding that none of the systems can provide certainty. The search for the One True System no longer seems credible.

In fact, the kinds of answers we want cannot be had, anywhere. Accepting this fact may lead to nihilism, the denial of all meaning. That is a bad outcome—but not a necessary one.

The complete stance recognizes that certainty is impossible, but that meaning is real. If we set aside the futile hope for absolute answers, we can find patterns of meaning that are usually good enough to navigate our lives. No ultimate, perfectly reliable foundation for morality or purpose is possible—but we do regularly solve problems of ethics and direction; and therefore we can!

  • 1. Kramer and Alstad’s The Guru Papers provides a penetrating analysis of the joy of eternalist self-blinding, particularly in the case of American pop religion, but also in eternalist political systems such as Communism.

The illusion of understanding

Can opener

Total understanding—the feeling that everything makes sense—is one of the most seductive promises of eternalism. The feeling is wonderful, but unfortunately the understanding is illusory.

Recent research shows how illusions of understanding arise, what their effects are, and how they can be dispelled. Most concretely, this includes studies of illusory understanding of everyday physical causality: common natural phenomena and household devices. That isn’t directly relevant to Meaningness. However, the same patterns of illusory understanding also apply to issues of meaningness, such as ethics and politics.

Understanding and explanation

Certainty, understanding, and control are closely linked promises of eternalism.1 If you are certain an explanation is correct, you have a stronger feeling of understanding. If you have an explanation for why something means something, it increases your certainty that it does mean that. If you understand something, you feel that you can control it. Psychology experiments show that people feel they can control events they definitely can’t, so long as they understand them.

Personal accounts of conversion to communism—an eternalist political ideology—provide fine examples of the emotional power of illusory understanding. Conversion brings newfound optimism, joy, insight, and all-encompassing comprehension.

The new light seems to pour from all directions across the skull; the whole universe falls into pattern like the stray pieces of a jigsaw puzzle assembled by magic at one stroke. There is now an answer to every question, doubts and conflicts are a matter of the tortured past—a past already remote, when one had lived in dismal ignorance in the tasteless, colorless world of those who don’t know.2

After all, every minute aspect of daily life is caught up in systems of material production, and therefore can be subjected to Marxist analysis. Waiting at the bus stop, the scheduled times for three buses go by, and then two appear all at once. Why? Because of capitalist exploitation. Everything is because of capitalist exploitation.

(Exercises for the reader: (1) Figure out why capitalist exploitation explains this common pattern of bus arrivals. (2) Figure out a better, non-Marxist explanation.3)

Marxism, like Catholicism, is an extremely well-worked-out system. Countless brilliant intellectuals, working for centuries, have already figured out explanations for everything. Well, almost everything. If you are willing to swallow a few camels, Jesuits will strain out all the gnats for you. In other words, if you accept a few giant absurdities, they can give coherent, logical explanations for all details.

Newer, less-elaborated ideologies—UFO cults, for example—may provide a strong, if vague, feeling of understanding. However, they have few explanations to back that up. This is one reason they mostly only work as closed subcultures. If you are a communist or Catholic, you can talk to outsiders without your belief system collapsing, because you have answers to their objections.

Illusions of understanding: everyday causality

Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil, in an influential 2002 paper, showed that people believe they understand familiar manufactured objects (such as can openers) and natural phenomena (such as tides) much better than they actually do. The researchers had subjects rate their understanding of various objects and phenomena, and then asked them to give an explanation. After that, the subjects rated their own understanding again. Their second ratings were much lower. Most subjects were surprised to find, after trying and failing to explain, that they understood much less than they had thought.

You might like to try this before reading on. On a scale of 1 to 7, how well do you think you understand a can opener? 1 would mean you know what it is for, but have basically no idea how it works. 7 means you know everything that anyone would know, short of being a can opener designer.

Now, explain how a can opener works. You could write this out in words, or draw a can opener from memory. Label the parts with what they do. (No fair looking at the picture at the head of this page! And for a fair trial, you need to do this on paper or screen; as we’ll see, it’s almost impossible not to cheat if you do it in your head.)

When you are done: has your estimate of your depth of understanding changed?

Now go look at an actual can opener, and at least put it up against a can as if you were about to open it. Turn the handle and watch how the mechanism moves. Then re-rate your written understanding. And how well do you think you understand now, after examining the reality?

I did this after reading the Rozenblit paper, and was surprised to find that my explanation had some details wrong, and significant missing parts. I also discovered, after playing with two ordinary manual crank-turning can openers, that they worked on completely different principles. I’ve used both types a million times, and never noticed this, because you use them exactly the same way. My rating of my original understanding went from 6 to 3. I’m estimating my new understanding at 6, but I’m worried I’m still overconfident!

It turns out that for most everyday objects, we have some vague mental image, but not an actual causal understanding. Here’s the Rozenblit paper:

Most people feel they understand the world with far greater detail, coherence, and depth than they really do. … [They] wrongly attribute far too much fidelity and detail to their mental representations because the sparse renderings do have some efficacy and do provide a rush of insight.

(“A rush of insight”… Remind you of something? A spectre haunting Europe, perhaps?)

We think we understand a can opener because we can play a mental movie of using one. That feels as though it is almost as good as actually watching. But:

The mental movie is much more like Hollywood than it is like real life—it fails to respect reality constraints. When we try to lean on the seductively glossy surface we find the façades of our mental films are hollow card-board. That discovery, the revelation of the shallowness of our mental representations for perceptually salient processes, may be what causes the surprise in our participants.

Unless you are a kitchen tool engineer, there’s no reason to actually understand how a can opener works. What everyone else needs is to know (1) what it is for and (2) how to use it. So most of the time “understanding” is really “comfort with.” It means you know how to interact with it well enough to get by, and you are reassured that it is not going to explode without warning. This comfort is provided mainly by familiarity, not understanding. Having used a can opener many times convinces you that you understand it, because you can almost always make one work, and you almost never cut yourself. Tellingly, Rozenblit and Keil found that their subjects did not overestimate their “how-to” knowledge, only their “how-it-works” knowledge.4

Learning how things work is usually a waste of time, from an evolutionary perspective. And total understanding is never even possible. The “illusion of explanatory depth” may have evolved to tell us when to stop:

We have to learn to use much sparser representations of causal relations that are good enough to give us the necessary insights: insights that go beyond associative similarity but which at the same time are not overwhelming in terms of cognitive load. It may therefore be quite adaptive to have the illusion that we know more than we do so that we settle for what is enough. The illusion might be an essential governor on our drive to search for explanatory underpinnings; it terminates potentially inexhaustible searches for ever-deeper understanding by satiating the drive for more knowledge once some skeletal level of causal comprehension is reached.

This doesn’t always work right; our brains’ guesses about when to stop can go wrong. Education theorists find that students often stop trying to understand too soon, when they merely feel “familiar” with the material, because the modern classroom demands a depth of understanding beyond what would have been useful to our ancestors. Conversely, my interest in Precambrian evolution is probably a pathological result of mild autism—a brain abnormality.

If you look closely at a can opener in operation, you can see immediately how it works. Then you forget as soon as you look away. Knowing that you could figure out how something works, whenever you need to, is a good reason not to bother until then—and not to remember afterward. Rozenblit and Keil hypothesized that our brains confuse vague visual memory with understanding, and that this was the source of the illusion they found.

This was confirmed in Rebecca Lawson’s study of people’s understanding of bicycles. She found that most people have no clue what a bicycle looks like, much less how one works, even if they own one. (I know that sounds implausible; the results in the paper are dramatic.) We all have a memory of seeing a bicycle, and on that basis think we know what one looks like—but few people can draw something that’s even approximately similar. The bicycle-like things they do draw could not possibly work.

You might like to try this before reading on. Don’t bother being artistic; the picture can just show how the main parts (handlebars, frame, seat, pedals, chain, wheels) attach to each other.

Lawson found that people can easily understand how a bicycle works, and draw one accurately, if there’s one in front of them. She writes:

We may be using the world as an “outside memory” to save us from having to store huge amounts of information. Since much of the information that we need in everyday life can be found simply by moving our eyes, we do not need to store it and then retrieve it from memory.

(This point will be important, by the way, in my explanations for how meaning works, much later in this book.)

Here’s a bicycle drawn by someone who rides one most days:

Bicycle drawing

This “bicycle” couldn’t turn, because the front wheel is connected to frame struts that form two sides of a rigid quadrilateral. Mistakenly, it has the chain going around the front wheel as well as the back one, which also would make turning impossible (among other problems, with gearing for instance).

Perceptual understanding isn’t possible for all devices—for example if they have hidden parts, or are very complicated, or run on invisible forces such as electricity.5

So what about meaning, which is also invisible?

Illusions of understanding: ethics

Most people think they understand ethics reasonably well. However, their ethical explanations often don’t make sense; they depend on weird assumptions, use dream logic, or skip over major issues. My story “The puzzle of meaningness” includes some humorous examples. Our feeling of understanding ethics is largely illusory; we don’t notice that our own ethical explanations are incoherent.

The following question is a classic of moral psychology research:

A woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to produce. He paid $200 for the radium and charged $2,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman’s husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get together about $1,000 which is half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said: “No, I discovered the drug and I’m going to make money from it.”6 So Heinz got desperate and broke into the man’s laboratory to steal the drug for his wife. Should Heinz have broken into the laboratory to steal the drug for his wife? Why or why not?

You might like to write out your own brief explanation before reading on.

This exercise may seem risky or embarrassing. A feeling of moral competence is often close to the heart of one’s sense of self. However, most experts say there is no right or wrong answer, although there are interestingly different kinds of answers.

It might also help to know that even professional theologians and moral philosophers are often unable to give coherent ethical explanations. Despite fancy footwork, theological answers boil down to “because that’s what God wants,” with no clear reason He wants that. Secular academic theories of ethics are all known to be wrong. Moral philosophers must support some theory, arguing “this is less bad than the others,” but most admit that their professional expertise is rarely useful when dealing with everyday ethical problems. Evidently, professional ethicists are afflicted with a powerful illusion of explanatory depth.

Why do people think they mostly understand ethics, if they can’t explain it coherently? As with can openers, we know what it is for, and we know how to use it well enough to get by. The feeling of understanding is an illusion based on familiarity and comfort. We know through experience that we can navigate ethical issues reasonably reliably, and they are not going to suddenly explode. As with devices, this is adequate for most people most of the time.

Ethics sometimes does explode on you—for example, if you are caught having an affair. It’s not just that there will be bad consequences; there will be many difficult choices and judgements in sorting out the mess, and the inadequacy of your ethical understanding may become obvious. Sometimes such crises lead to psychological growth, including developing a more sophisticated ethical understanding.

Research in moral psychology has found that people’s ethical understanding passes through a predictable series of stages. The stages are defined not in terms of what people consider right or wrong, but what sorts of explanations they use to justify those judgements. The Heinz story was invented by Lawrence Kohlberg as a way of eliciting such explanations. He assigned them to six stages of moral development. There are some problems with Kohlberg’s theory—mainly, it is too rationalistic—but the conclusion that people advance from lesser to greater ethical understanding seems correct, and important.

Disquietingly, research has found that most adults get stuck somewhere in the middle of the developmental sequence. The illusion of ethical understanding is one reason they may not progress. As with bicycles, if you think you know how ethics works, and can use it well enough most of the time, there seems no reason to try to understand better.

Robert Kegan has extended and improved Kohlberg’s framework. He describes an ethical equivalent to Rozenblit and Keil’s discovery that attempting to explain things can reveal one’s own lack of understanding. The illusion of understanding sometimes dissolves when you have to give an ethical explanation.

Realizing your explanations are inadequate opens the possibility of a forward ethical stage transition. This happens only rarely, however. One reason is that it is easy to recognize that your understanding of a bicycle is wrong, by visually comparing your drawing with a real one. It is much harder to reality-test moral understanding, because ethics are far more nebulous than bicycles.

Eternalism, by promoting a reassuring illusion of ethical understanding, hinders moral development. This is most obvious in religious fundamentalism, which denies the nebulosity of ethics, stranding you in a childish moral understanding. Rationalist eternalism typically fixates some moral theory that is also obviously wrong, but does have some coherent systematic justification. These are adolescent rather than childish; utilitarianism is a common example.

Fortunately, eternalist ethical systems have become less credible, so it’s easier to advance to more sophisticated understandings. Unfortunately, “easier” is not “easy,” and ethical anxiety—a sense of being lost at sea when it comes to ethics—is increasingly prevalent. That is a major topic of the upcoming chapter on ethics.

Illusions of understanding: politics

Contemporary “politics” is mostly about polarized moral opinions.7 It is now considered normal, or even obligatory, for people to express vehement political opinions about issues they know nothing about, and which do not affect their life in any way. This is harmful and stupid.

Political Extremism Is Supported by an Illusion of Understanding” (Fernbach et al., 2013) applies the Rozenblit method to political explanations. After subjects tried to explain how proposed political programs they supported would actually work, their confidence in them dropped. Subjects realized that their explanations were inadequate, and that they didn’t really understand the programs. This decreased their certainty that they would work. The subjects expressed more moderate opinions, and became less willing to make political donations in support of the programs, after discovering that they didn’t understand them as well as they had thought.

Fernbach et al. found that subjects’ opinions did not moderate when they were asked to explain why they supported their favored political programs. Other experiments have found this usually increases the extremeness of opinions, instead. Generating an explanation for why you support a program, rather than of how it would work, leads to retrieving or inventing justifications, which makes you more certain, not less. These political justifications usually rely on abstract values, appeals to authority, and general principles that require little specific knowledge of the issue. They are impossible to reality-test, and therefore easy to fool yourself with.

Extreme, ignorant political opinions are largely driven by eternalism. I find the Fernbach paper heartening, in showing that people can be shaken out of them. Arguing about politics almost never changes anyone’s mind; explaining, apparently, does.

This suggests a practice: when someone is ranting about a political proposal you disagree with, keep asking them “how would that part work?” Rather than raising objections, see if you can draw them into developing an ever-more-detailed causal explanation. If they succeed, they might change your mind! If not—they might change their own.

How does eternalism create illusions of understanding?

Eternalism promises to make everything make sense. It sometimes does deliver an illusion of universal understanding (as in the account of conversion to communism, above). Usually it can’t quite manage that, because almost all eternalism is wavering. The curtain that is supposed to conceal the illusionist is translucent. Most people realize they don’t understand everything. Still, eternalism does trick most people into believing they understand many things they don’t.

Somehow, we don’t notice that our explanations don’t make sense. How does eternalism manage that? I don’t have a complete answer, but I do have pieces of an answer. In fact, there is no one answer; eternalism has a big bag of tricks. The main part of this chapter describes a series of eternalist ploys: ways of thinking, feeling, talking, and acting that stabilize the stance. All of these are tricks for deliberately not understanding meaningness.

The rest of this page discusses some other mechanisms that don’t fit into this “eternalist ploy” category.

Visualizing meaningness

Research like Lawson’s bicycle experiment shows that genuine understanding usually depends on perceptual support. It comes from exploring concrete examples by looking and poking. To some extent we can transfer that understanding by mental visualization; but as Rozenblit found, this is sketchy.

Direct perceptual support is generally impossible for meaningness (ethics, purpose, and so on). However, we do use mental images to help understand these issues too. Thinking about the Heinz story, I generated an image of his children watching their mother dying, for example. Likewise, when thinking about life purpose, we fantasize scenes of accomplishment, or imagine dying without having gotten anything much done.

These images are emotive, but probably mostly unrealistic and unhelpful. (The Heinz story didn’t even mention children, for example; maybe he didn’t have any!) I suspect eternalism leads us to take these mental movies much more seriously than they deserve. (How? I’m not sure.)

Mystical experiences of total understanding

People in non-ordinary states, produced by psychedelic drugs or meditation, often proclaim sudden, unshakable, universal understanding. They rarely or never can explain their supposed understanding. I think these are probably mostly illusory. Such experiences may give genuine but ineffable insight into some things. I’m reasonably sure they involve no actual understanding of most things.

Eternalist systems are often led by people who have such visions; but most of their adherents don’t. Ordinary eternalists have to rely on the cosmic understanding of special people.

Socially distributed (mis)understanding of meaning

Understanding of the physical world is socially distributed. You don’t need to understand how to build a bicycle frame, because there are people whose job that is, and you can rely on their understanding.

The same division of labor applies to understanding meaning.8 For instance, if you are Catholic, you know (or should know) that masturbation is a grave sin.9 Why?

You may remember the story of Onan, who spilled his seed on the ground. You may also remember that the story is not about masturbation, but coitus interruptus. (That’s confusing.) You may recall that masturbation is a sin against chastity, and that the only proper use of the genitals is procreation. Or maybe also conjugal love. Why?

This is a pesky, impertinent question. You are (or should be) quite certain that you are correct, even if you can’t give a coherent explanation.

You don’t need to be able to give an explanation, because you know that if you go to a Jesuit, he will (or should)10 be able to explain in detail, with extensive logic, and answers to all objections. Your certainty can rest on your knowledge that an explanation is available, without having to know the details.

Although... for nearly everyone, it’s obvious that whatever explanation a priest gives for the evil of masturbation, it will be nonsense. It will be verbiage that sounds like explanation, but isn’t. Only loyalty to the eternalist system—the will to believe—could fool anyone into thinking it’s meaningful.

The same is true for most political opinions. Individuals are usually incapable of producing coherent explanations; but why should they?

You have heard experts on TV explaining Benghazi and Keystone, and they seemed to make sense; and you know they are good and trustworthy and smart people, because they share your fundamental values. You might not be able to explain those issues in detail, but you are confident that they can. But perhaps those explanations are about as accurate as the priest’s?

Agreeing to agree about meanings

Because eternalist delusion is so desirable, people collude to maintain it. We all agree to agree—vociferously—to whatever meanings our social group comes up with. That is a genuinely compassionate activity. We all want to save each other from nihilism.

Agreeing violently about political opinions is a major social activity. Groups of friends get together and regurgitate political explanations they’ve heard on TV or read on the web. This reinforces certainty and the illusion of understanding.

Talent for regurgitation gives you social prestige; people think it’s an important life skill. Imagine—if you got good enough at it, you could go on TV and vomit opinions in front of millions of people! Mostly, though, this is a collaborative, improvisatory, small-group activity.

Similarly, ethical explanation is mainly a social activity. Moral philosophers want ethics to be about rational individual decision-making, but it mostly isn’t. (This is one reason academic ethics is so useless.)

Research by Jonathan Haidt and others shows that ethical explanations are mostly used to justify actions we have taken or want to take. This “social intuitionism” is a descriptive theory, about how ethics works in practice. It’s not a good account (even according to Haidt) of how ethics ought to work.

In the ethics chapter, I’ll ask “what is ethics for?” if not social justification, and not rational individual decision-making. I’ll argue that genuine understanding is genuinely valuable.

  • 1. Nevertheless, certainty, understanding, and control all seem to be separate innate psychological drives. We seek certainty, even when understanding is entirely unavailable. We seek understanding, even when control is obviously impossible. Personally, I love understanding things like supernovas and Precambrian evolution, even though there’s nothing I can do with them.
  • 2. The God That Failed is a famous collection of accounts by Western intellectuals explaining why they converted to communism and later became disenchanted. I’m relying here on the summary in Baumeister’s Meanings of Life, p. 299. The quote is from Arthur Koestler, p. 23 in The God That Failed according to Baumeister; italics in original.
  • 3. This is called “bus bunching”; the Wikipedia has a fascinating explanation. The dynamical chaos theory used there is also important in my explanation of how meaning works.
  • 4. This result is actually a bit surprising, because the psychological literature generally finds that most people are overconfident about most things. Rozenblit and Keil did find overconfidence effects for some other types of knowledge, such as geography, but overconfidence about causality was much larger.
  • 5. Rozenblit and Keil found preliminary evidence that subjects were less likely to overestimate their understanding in these cases. I don’t know whether this has been confirmed by subsequent studies.
  • 6. If you know the least bit about drug development, this story will seem absurdly unrealistic. That annoys me. Maybe this absurdity is not relevant to the essential ethical dilemma, which you are supposed to somehow abstract from the details. However, I worry that unrealistic scenarios—the famous “trolley problems” are another example—give misleading results. In fact, I suspect artificial “thought experiments,” even if they weren’t obviously silly, may be worse than useless for understanding ethics. I’ll suggest later that observation of real-life ethical deliberation and action in “ecologically valid conditions” is needed instead.
  • 7. I’ll analyze this important, unfortunate development repeatedly, at various points later in the book.
  • 8. This will be central in my eventual explanation for how meaningness works. Interestingly (to me), my PhD thesis—titled Vision, Instruction, and Action—is also about perceptual understanding during improvised activity, and socially distributed understanding (communicated through over-the-shoulder instructions) of that activity.
  • 9. See Catechism 2396 if you are in doubt.
  • 10. Disastrously, some priests have gotten wobbly on masturbation, and are leading millions into damnation.

The fantasy of control

I want a remote control for my life
Image courtesy Bruno Souza Leão

If only you could get control over your life. If only things went according to plan. If only people did what they’re supposed to.

None of that is going to happen. Reality is often chaotic. Things fall apart, break down, slip away, blow up in your face—metaphorically, or for real.

The physical world, the social world, our selves, and meanings: all are nebulous—amorphous, ambiguous, changeable, uncertain. This makes complete control impossible.

Eternalism denies nebulosity. It hints that you can get control over your life—if you just make it conform to the proper patterns. This fantasy is one of eternalism’s strongest selling points—and most harmful lies.

Pursuing that fantasy has predictable bad results. Attempts to exert partial influence are often sensible and successful; attempts to gain complete control are dopey and disastrous.

Control is a major topic that shows up in many parts of this book. Besides eternalism, it is central for two dimensions of meaning, capability and contingency. It’s also significant in dualism, and plays a major role in confusions about the self, ethics, authority, and sacredness. This page is an introductory overview.

Control is closely connected with certainty and understanding, covered in the previous two pages. You may find it helpful to read those, if you haven’t already.

Nebulosity makes complete control impossible

Plane with cloud-seeding gun
Plane with cloud-zapping gun. (CC) Christian Jansky

“Nebulosity”—cloud-like-ness—is the impossibility of completely grasping anything. If we could just get a handle on things, we could force them to behave. But, to varying degrees, we never can.

This applies to the physical world, just as it does to the psychological, social, and meaning worlds. It is never possible to get perfect control even over a simple mechanical device. I’ll give technical explanations for this later, in discussions of dynamical chaos and the objective inseparability of objects. A simple way to see it, though: your device could always get hit by meteor, at any time, and then it will stop doing what you want. This is very unlikely, but shows that the world is never perfectly predictable.

Most activities involve other people, who are notoriously difficult to control. Even the most powerful tyrant cannot entirely manage it. Worse, perhaps, you cannot always control even yourself. Sometimes you find yourself doing things you hadn’t intended, and will probably regret later, because it’s what you want at the time. And, even when events go according to plan, their meanings may squirm out from under you. The outcome you so desired may be, objectively, just as you wanted it—and yet it no longer seems significant, as it did when you began. (I’ll say more about each of these types of failure of control later on this page.)

Overall, nebulosity often seems the main obstacle to control,1 and pattern the main resource. Nebulosity, therefore, often becomes the hated enemy. Eternalism promises to make nebulosity go away by fixating patterns, making complete control possible. Of course, it cannot.

Fortunately, nebulosity is not actually a hostile force. It delivers unexpected opportunities, and surprising good outcomes as well as bad ones. Learning to appreciate nebulosity is an important way out of eternalism and into the complete stance.

Pattern makes interaction possible

In the ideal situation of perfect control, you could make anything you want happen simply by choosing it. You would be unconstrained—causally unaffected—by the outside world. Control would flow only outward from you toward the world. The locus of control would be purely internal to you.

In the opposite extreme, you would be entirely controlled by the world, and any choices you might make would be meaningless. The locus of control would be entirely external, and causality would flow only inward, from the world acting on you.

Neither of these extremes occurs in reality. Ultimately, this is a fact of physics; causality is always distributed, and one thing cannot affect another without also being affected by it to some extent.2 However, it’s also obvious in everyday life, so long as you look without forcing an extreme internalist or externalist view.

Locus of control, in other words, is always nebulous: partial, shifting, uncertain, ambiguous. This is partly because the self/other boundary is itself nebulous; it’s often unclear what is “me” and what is “that.” Partly self and other are nebulous because locus of control is nebulous; these are, in part, two ways of saying the same thing. (This is a key aspect of my analysis of what “self” means.)

Because “control” is often understood as “complete control,” an alternate vocabulary may be useful. One might speak of “influence,” meaning partial control, for example. This is somewhat misleading, though, by suggesting that you are active and the world is passive (although passive-aggressive: it doesn’t always do what you tell it).

I prefer the word interaction: it suggests that both you and the world are actively participating in determining what happens.3 “Interaction” covers causality shared with both the non-human world and with other people.

Improvisation is characteristic of interaction. Because the world is nebulous, you can’t plan in advance everything you are going to do. You always have to figure some actions out as you go along. Usually, when the time comes, it’s obvious what you need to do, although you could not have foreseen it.

Collaboration is the most important form of interaction.4 Most human activities involve other people. Human interactions may be hostile; not all are collaborations. But collaborations are the most valuable, and most interesting (to me at least).

Practical activity is a spontaneous partner dance. You are continually responsive to the details of your unfolding situation, as revealed by perception. It is futile to try to force interactions to conform to a preconceived idea of how things should go.

Fukushima nuclear reactor on fire
Fukushima nuclear reactor on fire. (CC) Digital Globe

“Control” sometimes has negative connotations, and “collaboration” positive ones. However, my point is not moral or political. The issue here is not that control is not nice, it’s that complete control is physically impossible.

So long as you recognize that nebulosity is inevitable, there is nothing necessarily wrong with seeking partial control. Sometimes it’s even ethically imperative to get as much control as possible; for example in designing and operating a nuclear power plant.5

The psychology of control confusions

The rest of this page covers specific confused attitudes to control:

Illusions of control

In many situations, it is difficult or impossible to know how much control you have. You have to guess, based on understanding and experience. Extensive psychological research6 has shown that most people overestimate how much control they have—or could get—most of the time. This has several objectively harmful effects.

If you believe you have more control than you do, you are likely to take larger risks than you should. Experiments (and everyday experience) show that overconfidence leads to gambling-like behavior. It accounts for a lot of stupid accidents and bad life-decisions.

Overconfidence that you can eventually get control (through practice, or by applying bigger hammers) can make you waste time and resources trying to control the uncontrollable. Combined with the sunk cost fallacy, this can lead to applying ever increasing resources to an unworkable strategy. Believing that control must always be possible makes it difficult to learn from failure. Each disaster looks like a mere temporary setback, and you may take it as evidence that even more violent effort is called for.

Eternalism can make anything less than complete control emotionally unacceptable. Letting go, and accepting partial control, may seem too threatening. Then you may pursue control for its own sake, even when it has no objective benefit, or when the costs of maintaining control are obviously too high.

Control is only ever partial; but eternalistic hope for complete control can lead to over-controlling. That is the counter-productive application of extra force, complexity, or rigidity, when those actually result in less control, not more; or when the cost of increasing control outweighs its benefits.

Since it is pattern that makes partial control possible, over-control often attempts to impose a pattern by brute force. The pattern may be a real one that just doesn’t fit the situation (you are not actually that person’s best friend, so they aren’t going to do that task for you); or it may be an entirely imaginary one (you can’t actually find a cure for your retinopathy using tarot cards). Eternalism often leads to inventing spurious patterns that would grant control, and clinging to them even when there’s strong evidence against them, if that would mean loss of the illusion of control.7

A strong emotional need for control may lead you to refuse to deal with parts of reality that you can’t control to your satisfaction. Some people organize their lives to avoid most social interactions, or responsibility for anything mechanical, or dealing with money—as much as possible. Abandoning the possibility of incomplete control can have a high cost, drastically narrowing the scope of your life.8

One common response to nebulosity is excessive, obsessive planning: trying to figure out everything that could go wrong, and what you’d do if it did. Sometimes this is wise, but when you don’t fully understand the pattern, planning may be impossible. Over-control and planning also blind you to serendipity and unexpected opportunities.

Often it is better to observe the actual pattern, and to intervene minimally in its flow as events unfold. This skillful improvisation—often coupled with collaboration—can redirect existing forces in the direction you want.9 Such interaction doesn’t provide complete control, but may give better results. It also allows you to change course when new positive possibilities open.

Breakdown

Eternalism promises complete control, but cannot deliver. How to sustain the illusion, when non-control becomes obvious?

The first response is to invent an excuse. Eternalism explains away each failure as a one-off special situation that does not predict future lack of control.

The excuses given by American government agencies and multinational CEOs are essentially the same as those of African witchdoctors and of drug addicts everywhere. This is highly amusing once you notice the pattern.

No one ever says “We mostly don’t understand what is going on; the effects of our actions are inherently unpredictable; and our motivations are mixed, so we often undermine our own effectiveness.” (Even though that’s always the truth for everyone and every organization.) Instead:

  • Adverse global economic conditions
  • Sudden ripening of negative karma from a previous life
  • It’s society’s fault
  • Profits were impacted by supply chain issues
  • The gods are grumpy; someone in the village must be having an affair
  • It was due to a few corrupt individuals, and does not reflect the high ethical standards, dedicated work, and consistent competence of the Department as a whole
  • Negative energy from skeptics in the room interfered with the experiment
  • Train delays due to the wrong type of snow on the tracks
  • Demonic opposition, stirred up by enemy witchdoctors
  • Operational irregularities occurred
  • My assistant pronounced one of the words of the spell wrong
  • I never get that drunk

Everybody knows: I’m not that kind of guy; I wouldn’a did what I did, if I had’n of been high

Such excuses explain that the failure occurred only because you didn’t have control at the time. Therefore past failure doesn’t predict future failure, because of course in the future you will have control. Having control is “normal,” and should always be expected.

At some point, excuses run out, and the illusion of control collapses. Fear is the natural reaction to being out of control; and it can help deal with some bad situations. However, an eternalistic need to always maintain control can cause constant anxiety or even paranoia.

The eternalistic all-or-nothing tendency makes the sense of control brittle. Any temporary setback may flip you from an illusion of control into the illusion of no-control.

Illusion of helplessness: nihilistic anxiety and depression

Nihilism is the stance that denies all meaningful patterns. That makes meaningful control—or even influence—impossible.

Anxiety and depression are strongly associated with nihilism. Feeling of loss of control in a specific situation is frightening; feeling that you may lose all control produces pervasive anxiety. Concluding that you have lost all possibility of control—that you are entirely helpless—causes depression: the sense that all action is pointless.

Psychological research has demonstrated that depression collapses the illusion of control.10 Normally,11 people overestimate their control; when depressed, people may underestimate.12

Perceived lack of control results in learned helplessness—inhibition of practical action—which is believed to be closely related to depression.13 Similarly, people who experience an external locus of control have been shown to be prone to clinical depression.

Total responsibility is the confused stance, promoted by popular “spiritual” systems, that “you create your own reality.” Implicitly, it requires complete control of every aspect of the universe. The opposite stance, victim-think, promoted by popular “political,” “ethical,” and “psychological” systems, requires denying that you have any influence or power. Both stances try to save you from confronting the fearful question “how much control do I actually have?”. However, both absolutist answers lead to dysfunction and misery.

Research finds that people who perceive control as partly internal and partly external, and that it shifts back and forth, handle difficulties more effectively than those with either external or internal locus. This resonates with my claims for the psychological value of the complete stance. For this dimension of meaningness—capability—I call the complete stance light-heartedness. I’ve summarized it thus:

Playfully co-create reality in collaboration with each other and the world. No need for self-criticism or for anxiety. Effortless creativity. Obstacle: Hard to let go of need to be reassured about outcomes.

Self-control is impossible

Ice cream

This is obvious to anyone who has struggled to lose weight.

Eternalism wants to see the self as unitary, separate, durable, consistent, and well-defined—because then it could be in control. We are none of those things. Our selves are inherently, inescapably nebulous; and therefore uncontrollable.

It is often more accurate to see one’s self as a community of divergent, competing desires, with constantly-shifting political coalitions among them. Depending on which have the upper hand at any moment, the actions one chooses change. This frequently undermines plans and intentions. When desire for romance gains power, it forms a firm intention to avoid ice cream to lose weight and become more attractive; but when dessert time comes, desire for noms foments rebellion.14

Many excuses—particularly the excuses you make to yourself—boil down to “it wasn’t really me who did that.” (“Everybody knows I’m not that kind of guy!”) At some level, this is outrageously hypocritical; but it is also honest and accurate. The political coalition of desires that drove drunk was not the same coalition that regrets it the next morning—and those coalitions are more-or-less what we call a “self.”15

Consistent choices would also depend on a clear boundary between “me in here” and “the world out there.” The self/other boundary is always somewhat nebulous, however; so you cannot make perfectly independent choices. The more open you are to others, the less control you have. You probably wouldn’t have driven home drunk if your friends at the bar hadn’t done the same.

Disgust with your own inconsistency motivates the stance of True Self. That would be “who I really am”16—a unitary, separate, durable, consistent, and well-defined ideal. The “false self” is the divided, easily-influenced, impetuous, devious, incoherent one. If only you could become your True Self, you would be perfectly virtuous and always in control.

The True Self stance motivates over-control of your desires, and totalitarianism in your internal politics. The supposed True Self—itself actually just a coalition of impulses, fantasies, and fears—becomes a tyrant. It enforces a rigid personal morality and exiles the rest of the self to a dank prison cell. Fearing internal anarchy, it suppresses most enjoyment, creativity, and spontaneity, lest they undermine its control. Festering in the dark, these suppressed self-fragments grow monstrous, twisted, powerful. When eventually they break out in revolt, the carnage can be gruesome.17

A healthy self is a series of negotiated compromises among hopes, fears, projects, desires, and relationships, based on recognition that complete control is impossible, so all aspects of the self get enough of what they need that conflict is minimized.

The upcoming chapter on selfness discusses these issues in detail.

Control of others is impossible (and attempts are harmful)

To gain complete control over your own life, you would need to control other people. Not only their actions, but also their thoughts and feelings—because those interact with your own.

Complete control of people is even more impossible than complete control of the inanimate world. Partial control or influence, by various means, is possible, and may often be benign. Sanity requires accepting that everything you do is a collaboration. It also requires accepting partial control (or influence) of others over you.

The eternalistic compulsion toward over-control leads to coercion and abuse of power. Ethical eternalism—moral certainty—provides spurious justifications for forcing other people to do what you want. This ranges in scale from family relationships to world wars.

Totalitarianism, a manifestation of political eternalism, is an extreme example. Ideologues rationalize oppression as necessary for preventing the nihilist apocalypse, a dystopian fantasy of ethical anarchy caused by loss of institutional control.

The stance of reasonable respectability, which fixates the social order, makes despotic control easier. Its opposite, romantic rebellion, denies the value of institutions, and views all power as illegitimate, coercive control.

Control by proxy

Identifying your self with a more powerful proxy can give a vicarious sense of control. This is a back-up strategy when personal control is too obviously impossible.

Proxies include individuals, such as political and religious leaders; social groups, such as tribes, nations, and sects; imaginary people, such as God, gods, or culture-heroes; and abstractions, such as political and religious ideologies.

This illusion of control depends on psychological identification, allegiance, and surrender. You have to give up your own control—in a particular area of life, at least—to transfer the locus to the proxy. Psychological surrender gives a feeling of connection or union with something much greater and more meaningful than your personal concerns.

Feeling that you are part of a group allows you to participate emotionally in its strength and success. This is true even when the tribe—or its leaders—do not provide you with any actual control over your life. Sports fandoms are a benign example. Oppressive political regimes that maintain popular support are perhaps the worst. Vicarious power through identification with the state seems an acceptable trade-off to many subjects.

In fact, this dynamic seems to underly most malign power relationships, ranging from domestic abuse through Stockholm syndrome and anti-life religions to totalitarian dystopias. Despotic “leaders” can never rule by force and fear alone; they depend on worshipful surrender and identification.18

Monism and dualism: control by connection and by separation

Eternalism comes in two main flavors, monist and dualist. Monism denies boundaries and fixates connections. Dualism denies connections and fixates boundaries.

Control usually depends on boundaries, connections, or both. Since both are ubiquitous, it’s usually best to consider and manipulate both. However, the monism and dualism’s denials lead them to ignore one, and to try to exert control only through the other.

Monism attempts control exclusively through connections. When genuine connections do not permit control, it invents imaginary ones. This is typical of magical thinking. “Psychic powers,” New Age quack therapies, and the Law of Attraction are typical examples.

Dualism attempts control exclusively through boundaries: categorizing, discriminating, separating, sorting, ranking, and purifying. This becomes dysfunctional when nebulous reality fails to fit into tidy boxes. Bureaucracy, caste systems, and “enterprise software” are typical examples.

Control by renouncing action

The Secret

Popular “spiritual” books like The Secret recommend abandoning all attempts at control, or even action, in favor of spiritual virtue (“positive thinking”). This is an extreme version of control-by-proxy, in which the proxy is the Cosmic Plan, or The Entire Universe, and it does all the work.

This approach is typical in monist systems, which deny all boundaries. Since, monism says, you are The Entire Universe, its actions and yours are identical. Any attempt to act on your own simply limits you, by creating an artificial and illusory separation.

Renunciation often acts as a moralistic reward fantasy. For monism, control is not OK, because control depends on differences, which monism denies. Since everything is the same, everything is equal, and nothing can be allowed to control anything else. Giving up control is a supremely virtuous act, which The Entire Universe rewards by showering you with everything you could possibly want.

Obviously, adopting this strategy leads to severe emotional dysfunction, passive-aggressive relationships, and total inability or unwillingness to deal with everyday responsibilities.

Control is intolerably dull

Total control (which requires total predictability) is totally boring. Life needs some challenges, surprises, setbacks, and serendipity to make it interesting. Enjoyment and personal growth come only with partial control.19

Highly-successful people, whose lives are too much under control, often semi-deliberately mess them up, for example with an extramarital affair whose revelation destroys their career as well as their marriage. The thrill of risk, and the difficulty of avoiding detection, breaks the monotony of excessive control. It is better, of course, to leave what is going well on autopilot, and to take on greater challenges in new domains.

Meanings are out of control

Meaningness itself is nebulous, and therefore uncontrollable. This undermines practical activity that attempts to control meaningful conditions. Nebulosity of meaning implies constant uncertainty about the merits of purposes; about what counts as progress and setbacks; about what methods would be ethical or unethical; about how your choices shape and are shaped by your self; and about implications that may go beyond the personal, immediate, and obvious, into the greater, mysterious patterns of meaning claimed by religion and social philosophy.

The puzzle of meaningness” illustrates many aspects of these problems in the context of an adultery.

The attraction was overwhelming. The sex was scalding. You loved with a passion you had never felt before.

In time, it waned; and you ended the affair.

Now, you wonder: what did that mean? In the beginning, it seemed enormously significant. By the end, it had slid into a casual friendship plus sex.

Were you mistaken in thinking it was meaningful at the start? Or did it have a meaning that it lost?

And was the affair right, or wrong, or perhaps somehow somewhere in-between?

What does it mean about you that you cheated—which you were sure you never would do? Should you be less certain about yourself in other ways?

Marriage is a sacrament; but this affair also seemed at first to have a sacred dimension. Was that just a self-justifying illusion?

  • 1. Not always, of course; sometimes you simply lack the prerequisites needed for a course of action which would be highly likely to succeed if you had then.
  • 2. At the level of fundamental physics, all forces are symmetrical; they act mutually on pairs of particles. This is not much relevant to everyday life, however. I’ll explain a more relevant, macroscopic understanding of distributed causality on the discussion of dynamical chaos.
  • 3. “Interaction” is still somewhat misleading, unfortunately. It suggests that there are two or more objectively separate parties involved, which is not true.
  • 4. My prehistoric PhD thesis was also about improvisation and collaboration, and the impossibility of control. Some people just don’t know when to move on in life.
  • 5. Even there, tsunamis (for instance) make complete control impossible. Recognizing this, the trend in nuclear reactor design has been from active to passive safety. Active control makes human activity the locus, along with complex electrical systems to which humans delegate. It’s external to the reactor. Passive safety shifts the locus into the reactor itself. For example, in some designs, when things go wrong, it shuts down by literally falling apart. Gravity does the work.
  • 6. Control is a major topic in academic psychological research. I have not studied the results seriously. This page is based largely on my informal observation of control confusions in everyday life. The research I have read accords with my observations. I have linked some topics to relevant Wikipedia pages, which could be starting points if you would like to investigate further. (As of mid–2015, most of the Wikipedia articles are not very good, but their references may be useful.) I have not found good overall review articles. This may be because control has been studied by many different branches of psychology, using different frameworks and terminology that are difficult to align. “Born to Choose: The Origins and Value of the Need for Control” includes a not-terrible survey.
  • 7. The gambler’s fallacy is a well-studied, if somewhat simplistic, example. “Interpretive control” is a broader psychology research term for inventing explanations in order to feel you have control when you don’t. See for instance Baumeister’s Meanings of Life, p. 42.
  • 8. Experimental psychology and psychotherapeutic theory corroborate most of the harmful control dynamics I describe here. Psychology has not found convincing reasons for them. They seem clearly maladaptive; so why do brains do these things? I suspect the answer is: eternalism, as such. The desire to believe that everything has a fixed meaning appears to be enormously powerful. It is significant that (as we’ll see in the next section) depression, which is the negation of eternalism, reverses most of these control dynamics. Although eternalism is partly innate, it is strongly reinforced by modern Western culture. It would be interesting to see whether harmful control dynamics are less prevalent among hunter-gatherer peoples, for instance. Based on the little I know of the relevant cognitive anthropology, I suspect the answer is yes.
  • 9. I wrote about this in more detail, but in a rather different conceptual framework, in “Unclogging.”
  • 10. Actually, the studies I have read only show a correlation between depression and absence of the illusion. I do not know of experiments that show conclusively which causes which. (If you do, I would love to hear about it!) Based on personal experience, I believe that the causality is bidirectional. That is, depression brought on for other reasons results in loss of the feeling of control, and feeling that important factors are out of control can provoke depression.
  • 11. “Normally” here meaning what is most common: “under the influence of eternalism.” However, I don’t think eternalism is altogether natural. I would like to believe that the complete stance is “normal” (although uncommon) in being “natural”; and that adopting it would eliminate control illusions.
  • 12. Originally this was called “depressive realism” because in the first experiments that demonstrated it, depressed people estimated their degree of control roughly correctly. However, subsequent experiments have shown that depression correlates just with decreased sense of control, and in some situations depressed people underestimate it.
  • 13. The resulting psychological stress can be literally lethal in experimental animals.
  • 14. George Ainsle’s Breakdown of Will is an outstanding analysis of this pattern, technically termed akrasia.
  • 15. Breakdown of Will and The Guru Papers both provide much insight here.
  • 16. This is an interesting example of the weaselly function of the word “really.”
  • 17. I wrote about aspects of this in “We are all monsters,” “Eating the shadow,” and “Black magic, transformation, and power.” See also Breakdown of Will, The Guru Papers, and A Little Book on the Human Shadow, which discuss the pattern extensively.
  • 18. The Guru Papers is an extensive, insightful analysis for the religious domain. For politics, “The Good Tsar Bias” analyzes several cases, including Hitler and Stalin. Both men created personality cults according to which they were powerful, benevolent leaders whose naive goodness enabled underlings to get away with incompetence, corruption, and mass murder. “If only Stalin knew what evils are done in his name!” was a common Russian attitude. “The closer a leader is tied to the symbols of the nation or group with whom they identify, and the closer people’s identification with the nation or group is, the more difficult it should be for them to accept that the leader is responsible for bad outcomes, since such acceptance threatens one’s identity, and the more likely it will be for them to displace that responsibility onto subordinates as a protective measure.”
  • 19. This point was made famous by Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. See also my post “Tantra and flow.”

The wheel of fortune

The Wheel of Fortune, from the Hortus Deliciarum
Lady Luck turns the Wheel of Fortune

The meanings we care about first and foremost are good and bad. Not good and evil—not ethics, not yet—but good and bad for us. We want to know how the wheel of fortune will turn. Will particular people, things, and events be blessings—or disasters? Where do goodness and badness come from, and how can we influence them? What do good and bad events imply for other dimensions of meaningness—social relations, our selves, and our purposes?

Eternalism promises answers: certainty about what is good and what is bad, and understanding and control over what produces them. However, “good” and “bad” are not intrinsic qualities.1 Reality is not about us, and doesn’t know or care whether it benefits or harms us. “Good” and “bad” are not merely unpredictable; they are inherently nebulous: mixed, shifting, ambiguous. Thus, broad answers to “will good things or bad things happen?” are impossible.

And so, again, eternalism cannot deliver. Relying on its claims about good and bad is a recipe for disappointment, if not disaster.

Elaborating meanings of good and bad

Eternalism is about seeing meaning where there is none, and adding extra meaning even to what is already genuinely meaningful. Chance events—turns of the wheel of fortune—are taken not just as good or bad, but meaningfully good or bad.

Eternalism gives good and bad events implications for all the dimensions—purpose, ethics, our selves, social relations, and so on. Good outcomes are mistaken as rewards or confirmations. Bad ones appear as omens of still worse to come, or deserved punishments, or as tests from God.

The “just world hypothesis” is the pervasive assumption—explicit or tacit—that good and bad outcomes are not random, but deserved. The eternal ordering principle guarantees that. This is the beginning of the elaboration of good and bad into good and evil. Good and Evil often become independent actors: as vague “forces,” or personified as spooks,2 human individuals, or social groups.

Eternalistic systems typically promise good outcomes—for those who obey the demands of the eternal ordering principle. Bad outcomes are due to violations of the cosmic order. Violations can be reversed by purification, which restores the order.

If the eternal order can be violated, then how is it eternal? And, how can bad things happen to good people? Many outcomes are obviously random; eternalism is obviously wrong, as everyone knows at some level. Various strategies of self-delusion cover this up, in order to preserve an optimistic outlook. Elaborate theories of cosmic justice in the afterlife are attempts to preserve eternalism against everyday experience. When these eternalistic ploys fail, nihilism looms.

Good, bad, naturalism, and supernaturalism

Old illustration of the wheel of fortune

A major theme of this chapter on eternalism is that errors usually attributed to supernaturalist religions are also common among atheists, and in naturalistic ideologies. This includes mistaken ideas about good and bad—but those are particularly prone to supernatural explanations.

In the short run, good and bad manifest as luck. A feeling of being lucky, or unlucky, is nearly impossible for even the most committed secular scientific rationalist to avoid at times. “I get duped by eternalism in a casino” is a personal account of such an incident. In “No cosmic justice” I observed that:

A vague, incoherent expectation of cosmic justice is one of the hardest aspects of our Christian heritage to shake off. I am a life-long atheist, and have never actually believed in cosmic justice. Yet I still sometimes catch myself hoping that I will somehow be magically rewarded for good deeds.

Magical thinking is a powerful eternalist ploy. It promises certainty about the spinning wheel of fortune, through esoteric techniques such as divination, psychobabble, and career counseling. Imaginary connections “explain” random coincidences. Underlying all this is the assumption that the universe is about us—and since our lives are meaningful, everything else must be, too.

Explicitly non-supernatural eternalisms make the same promises. Communism guarantees a good outcome for history: eventually capitalism must collapse, and be replaced by a worker’s paradise. UFO cults expect imminent salvation by benevolent aliens. Techno-futurists are sure a Singularity will soon deliver us from all material afflictions (or perhaps doom us to sudden extinction). These are all silly, but they postulate no supernatural forces.

Fate, destiny, and finality

Pat Sajak and Vanna White, from the TV show Wheel of Fortune
Vanna White and Pat Sajak

In the long run, eternalism sees good and bad as the concern of fate. Proper distribution of good and bad is the main point of the Cosmic Plan. Both individuals and social groups (tribes, nations, even our species) supposedly have fates.

We are particularly concerned about what happens in the end. This is the matter of destiny. It is commonly considered that the only real meaning—of an object, event, life, or group—is the meaning it has as it ends. Whatever may happen before that doesn’t properly count.3 As an extreme case, in some versions of both Christianity and Buddhism, the only thing that matters for determining your fate in the afterlife is your mind state at the moment of death.

The final meaning is the eternal meaning, and therefore the “real” one. This discounts most actual meanings, in favor of eternalistically-ascribed ones—which is wrong. We’ll see later that this error leads to nihilism, when you realize that nothing is meaningful to you after you die.

Eternalism promises good outcomes to those who obey. Miserabilism, a stance closely connected with nihilism, guarantees everyone bad outcomes.

Beyond good and bad

Humans (and other animals) evolved to force-fit everything into the categories “good,” “bad,” and “irrelevant.”4 We make snap judgements about these three—and are often proven wrong. Some events are unambiguously one way or another; but even the most important ones usually have both good and bad aspects. We acknowledge this in phrases like “a silver lining” and “a mixed blessing.”

Recognizing the nebulosity of meanings is the way out of the maze of eternalism and nihilism, and into the complete stance. Suspending judgements of “good” and “bad” and “uninteresting” is a particularly effective escape route. Playful curiosity is characteristic of the complete stance. “What is this like?” and “How does it work?” and “What happens if…” are usually better questions than “Is this good, or bad?”

Qualifying judgements of good and bad is essential in adequate approaches to ethics and politics, particularly. (These will develop into major points later in the book.)

DESTINY: A tyrant’s authority for crime and a fool’s excuse for failure.5

Interpreting good and bad as good and evil turns them into absolutes, over which no compromise is possible. Ever-escalating embroilment ensues. Dropping good and evil is a first step toward a non-eternalist ethics. (Although only a first step—replacing them with “harm and benefit” can lead to eternalist utilitarianism, for instance. Those, too, are nebulous—so utilitarianism can’t succeed as an eternalist system.)

For politics to be anything more than a quantitative showdown, both sides in a conflict must recognize the nebulosity of their interests. Not only are those people not simply evil, and us folks not simply holy: what they want is not purely wrong, and what we want is not an unalloyed good. When all can drop the moral posturing, all may be able to work together to find an outcome all can live with—which will not be good, bad, or uninteresting, but a nebulous combination of all three.

  • 1. They are not merely our opinions, either, though. As with all meanings, they are neither objective nor subjective.
  • 2. Benevolent and malevolent spooks, as causal explanations for good and bad outcomes, are a cultural universal. Sometimes there are also moody spooks who alternate capriciously: a sensible explanation for the randomness of good and bad events. I find it sad and telling that few care what spooks think or do when it doesn’t affect humans.
  • 3. I don’t know where this idea comes from. It’s obviously nonsense, but pervasive. I’ve tried to construct an explanation in terms of evolutionary psychology, according to which what mostly matters is whether you get progeny to adulthood before dying. An estimate of whether you are likely to succeed critically affects your optimal life strategy. The less likely evolutionary success is, the more evolutionarily rational high-stakes gambles (such as murder, rape, and robbery) become. I haven’t been able to make this explanation work, quite. Perhaps the source of the idea is mere cultural accident.
  • 4. Presumably this is an efficient strategy for animals with simple brains and simple lifestyles. It doesn’t work well for humans, but brain evolution hasn’t caught up with cultural evolution. Also: the Buddhist influence on this book should be unusually obvious here. Buddhism holds that “attraction, aversion, and indifference” are the cause of all suffering. I think that’s an oversimplification, but insightful nonetheless.
  • 5. Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.

Eternalism as the only salvation from nihilism

Corpus hypercubus

If all meanings are fixed, then ambiguous meanings are not meaningful at all. To eternalism, any potential nebulosity of meaning looks like non-existence of meaning. Any morality that is not black-and-white is just immorality; any life-purpose that is not ordained in the Cosmic Plan is aimless wandering; any uncertainty about who you are is intolerable.

In other words, to eternalism, every other stance appears to be nihilism, more-or-less. Nihilism actually is harmful and wrong—eternalism is right about that. If nihilism were truly the only alternative, perhaps eternalism would be the least bad choice. That is a main part of its appeal.

When eternalism’s promises of certainty, understanding, and control are revealed as lies, nihilism looms. The promise to keep nihilism at bay is then eternalism’s final ploy.

Increasingly many Westerners have abandoned organized religion, but surprisingly few say they are atheists. They may say “I don’t believe in God, exactly, not as a person, but I believe in something—maybe you could say a higher power, or the universe as a whole, or maybe it’s love—it doesn’t really matter what you call it.”1

I think what they are trying to say is that they believe meaning is real; and I think they are right. Theirs is a relatively sophisticated stance: nihilism is wrong, and so are God-based religious systems. But it’s not true that, for meaning to be real, it has to be fixed in place by some other eternal ordering principle.

I will deliver good news: there is a third alternative that includes what’s right about both eternalistic religion and nihilism; avoids the errors of both; is conceptually coherent; and is workable as a way of life.

  • 1. For instance, in a controversial interview, Oprah Winfrey told atheist Diana Nyad “I think if you believe in the awe and the wonder [of nature], and the mystery, then that is what God is. It’s not the bearded guy in the sky.”

Eternalism is harmful

Surreal image illustrating eternalism
Art courtesy Dita

Eternalism makes promises it can't keep. It lies about the things that are most important to us. It makes us do stupid, crazy, evil things. And we still love it and keep going back for more.

Eternalism seems so nice. It is hard to believe ill of it. Yet always it drops its victims in seething cauldrons of misery. The message of this entire book is: eternalism is bad;1 there is a better alternative. So, much of the book consists of warnings about eternalism’s harms. This page is an overview.

The harms are myriad. Some I have already discussed: troubles that flow from the promise of certainty, the illusion of understanding, and the fantasy of control. Some I will detail shortly, in the sections on eternalist ploys and non-theistic eternalisms. Many must be postponed to chapters on stances allied with eternalism, such as mission, true self, and ethical eternalism, each with harms specific to its dimension of meaningness.

Broadly, we might categorize harms as:

  • Deliberate stupidity
  • Emotional regression with an abusive, addictive dynamic
  • Bad practical outcomes from unrealistic actions based on imaginary meanings
  • Emotional pain from trying to conform to eternalism when it’s obviously not working
  • Morally wrong decisions based on absolutist ethics

We are not stupid enough for eternalism

Eternalism comes naturally; human brains evolved to hallucinate meaning where there is none. Any other stance takes at least a little thought. Nihilism, especially, is difficult. It's only possible to maintain nihilism using sophisticated rationalizations that explain away obvious meaningfulness. Other, more complex stances depend on dubious metaphysical distinctions that take work to apply in concrete circumstances.

Nevertheless, eternalism is obviously wrong. Everyone can see that many events are completely meaningless, and the meanings even of important ones are often nebulous.

To maintain eternalism, you have to deliberately stupefy yourself. You need to damage your own natural intelligence to not-see nebulosity and to preserve illusions of meaningfulness and cosmic order. Starting on the next page, I'll explain various mind-killing ploys you can use to hide eternalism’s failures and lies.

Eternalism can provide bogus feelings of intelligence, from perceiving patterns that aren't there. This is the rush of excitement as the new convert to an eternalist system “discovers” that Mindfulness or Marx or Mormonism explains everything. Desire for meaning makes you willing to sabotage your critical ability, in order to accept preposterous stories in which the Cosmic Plan makes everything make sense. That inhibits curiosity and the natural drive to find a better understanding.

In the end, no one can make themselves stupid enough to accomplish eternalism—to maintain the stance at all times. Everyone, at times, does recognize nebulosity—and so moves into some other stance.

Eternalism is regressive and addictive

Eternalism is comforting, when life is going well enough. Then you can choose to ignore the ways reality fails to fit fixed meanings. Eternalism’s promises of hope and solace seem credible. You can live in a pastel fantasy world. So eternalism “works” as long you can maintain a childish, self-indulgent obliviousness—which is its characteristic emotional texture.

Maintaining eternalism requires emotional regression, into a toddler’s bedroom, watched over by a wise protecting parent: the Cosmic Plan, or some authority who poses as its representative. When you are unable to keep deluding yourself, you look for someone more powerful to do the job: someone or something that can affirm eternalism in the face of your perception of the contradictory evidence. The parent-figure promises to protect you from nebulosity. You choose this relationship specifically to obstruct emotional and intellectual growth when that seems too frightening.

Preserving comforting illusions may be psychologically valuable in the short run, in times of crisis: as antidotes to depression, anxiety, and despair. (Those are symptoms of nihilism, which may be the only accessible alternative to eternalism for some people.) In the longer run, this pain-killing function leads to helplessness and addiction.

As the opening paragraph of this page suggested, a relationship with eternalism may resemble addictive dynamics of domestic abuse, which keep a victim returning to the abuser. The victim believes—rightly or wrongly—that they are powerless, and that the abuser is powerful. The victim hopes that the abuser would act as a protector against the world, if properly propitiated. This requires the victim to delude themselves that the abuser has loving intentions, and that the abuse episodes are somehow be triggered by the victim’s inadequacy.

Eternalism has bad practical results

Eternalism promises eternally good feelings. And it is a comforting ride—until it crashes into reality and you get hurled from your seat onto the open highway.

Meanings have consequences. Meaning is not an autonomous domain, disconnected from practical reality; everyone frequently acts on the basis of perceived meanings. But those are often wrong. Eternalism says the world is good, and I am good, so if I choose to do something good, then the result must be good! But often it isn’t.

As we saw earlier, eternalism’s illusions of understanding and control fantasies often lead over-confidence, excess risk-taking, over-control, and other unrealistic patterns of action. Alternatively, the delusion that you must base action on the Cosmic Plan leads to paralysis when you are unable to discern what it demands. (This is particularly common in the stance of mission, which is closely related to eternalism.)

Acting based on imagined meanings frequently fails. Harm and pain ensue. Eternalism’s synthetic certainty ensures that this comes as a shock, each time. Each time, one experiences it as a betrayal. I am a good person; this wasn’t supposed to happen to me!

Then, disillusioned, you may exit eternalism into another stance. Alternatively, you may apply ploys to maintain eternalism—probably in an increasingly shaky, wavering form.

Wavering eternalism is emotionally painful

Eternalism persuades you that you should maintain the stance at all times. This has moral force; if you waver in your commitment, you are a bad person. However, it is impossible to accomplish consistent eternalism. This implies perpetual struggle, with shame and guilt at imperfection, and much wasted effort.

The wavering eternalist feels intense confusion during periods of doubt.

When eternalism fails, it tries to convince you that it’s your fault, for wavering, for not trying hard enough, for being unworthy of the Cosmic Plan. Then you may punish yourself—as harshly as you can, to demonstrate your renewed commitment. (The Cosmic Plan can’t punish you adequately; it doesn’t exist!)

As you repeatedly experience eternalism failing when it encounters nebulosity, you develop fear and loathing of ambiguity and change. You come to avoid areas of life that seem particularly nebulous. This progressively narrows your scope for action, leading to rigidity or even paralysis. You may isolate yourself socially: from everyone, or into a closed group that agrees to pretend eternalism works. You may adopt an aggressive hostility toward anyone who reminds you of nebulosity.

You may come to feel cramped and imprisoned in the small safe space where eternalism seems to function. Creativity and daring become impossible.

You somehow cannot find your true mission in life, for which eternalism would guarantee success. You neglect mundane goals as mere materialism, meaningless in the eyes of the eternal ordering principle. Most of the time, you cannot locate your true self; your miserable ego’s attempts to live up to its ideals are pathetic. Sometimes, you believe you have found your true self and mission, and go off on a fantastical ego-trip crusade, which needs constant confirmation from followers and eventually ends in catastrophe.

Eternalism is immoral

The eternal ordering principle is a cruel tyrant. The Cosmic Plan makes insane demands—and calls that morality. It sometimes commands harmful actions; it often fails to promote beneficial ones. Following its dictates causes damage to yourself and others.

Ethical issues are inescapably nebulous. Ethical eternalism blinds you to the complexity, ambiguity, and situatedness of moral decision-making. Taken seriously, it leads to moral absolutism and political extremism.

Religiosity promotes paranoia about contamination; blaming of victims; waste of resources and opportunities; and tribalist conflict.

  • 1. Also, nihilism. Nihilism is bad too. But most people know that.

Eternalist ploys and their antidotes

Chess move

Eternalist ploys are ways of thinking, feeling, talking, and acting that stabilize the eternalist stance.

Eternalism is inherently unstable because it is obviously wrong and harmful. Yet it feels so good that one wants to find ways to maintain the stance. Ploys are ways to blind oneself to nebulosity and to trick oneself into finding meaning where there is none.

For example:

  • Imposing fixed meanings is a way of thinking using artificial, prescribed categories
  • Hope is a way of feeling that shifts imaginary meaning to the future, when the present is obviously meaningless
  • Wistful certainty is a way of talking that asserts the presence of meaning where none can be found
  • Purification is a way of acting that forces reality to conform to meaningful concepts

Each page in this section describes one eternalist ploy: how it works, and an example of the ploy in action. I explain how each causes harm, and an antidote to apply when you find yourself using the ploy and would rather not.

It is not so easy to see the casual, random occurrences of everyday life as meaningful; so individual eternalist ploys are usually not highly effective, or not for long. Typically we switch rapidly from one to the next, as the inadequacy of each becomes obvious. Or, we deploy several at once, hoping to overwhelm our intelligence with multiple spurious arguments.

Some ploys you are unlikely to use if you are not committed to eternalism. Others, everyone falls into sometimes, even when committed to nihilism or the complete stance (both of which reject eternalism).

You will find all of them familiar, either from personal use or from overhearing them used. Still, it may be useful to read the explicit analyses, because the concept of “eternalist ploys” may provide new insight into their operation.

The ploys are particularly easy to observe in religious fundamentalism and political extremism. Such systems use them in heavy-handed, clumsy ways, making them obvious. In this section, I mainly describe the ploys as methods for fooling yourself; but priests and politicians use them rhetorically to fool others too. Later in the book, I discuss eternalism as a route to social power.

Four groups of eternalist ploys

I have categorized the ploys into four groups.

  • By definition, eternalism means seeing everything as meaningful—although most things aren’t. The first group of ploys hallucinate meanings where there are none.
  • Many things are obviously meaningless, or have obviously nebulous meanings. The second groups of ploys blind you to meaninglessness and nebulosity.
  • Sometimes it’s impossible not to perceive meaninglessness, and so all those ploys fail. The third group explains away meaninglessness.
  • Finally, if meaninglessness cannot be explained away, you have to react in some way. The fourth group tries to cope with meaninglessness when it’s unavoidable.

Alternatively, the ploys could be grouped based on whether they are typically used in monist eternalism or dualist eternalism—or both. Most are used in both. However, smearing meaning around, magical thinking, and bafflement are particularly useful for monist eternalism. Similarly, fixed meanings, hiding from nebulosity, arming, and purification are particularly useful in dualist eternalism.

[I am unsure about my current list of ploys. They seem to overlap and run into each other somewhat, and I also expect I may find more of them. I may need to "refactor" the categories. Feedback about this would be welcome!

For now, I have provided unfinished versions of the pages describing the ploys. They are preliminary, incomplete drafts; I’ll come back and finish them when I’m more confident that overall scheme is correct. However, there should be enough explanation for each that you will understand how they work, and so can recognize them in operation.]

Imposing fixed meanings

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

The eternalist ploy imposing fixed meanings is the first of several that hallucinate meanings that don’t exist, in order to avoid perceiving nebulosity.

This ploy tries to force a pre-determined set of categories on experience. These often have fixed positive and negative values, and demand that you take particular actions in response to them. The “abominations” of the Old Testament are examples. “Stereotypes” are one contemporary secular manifestation.

Often these categories don’t fit, and the imposed meanings are wrong. When you act on them, reality eventually slaps you upside the head. You get unpleasant outcomes you didn’t expect—based on your wrong categorization. Then you are shocked and confused; the conceptual system breaks down and you have no idea what to do.

The antidote is curiosity. Wonder what things mean; investigate without presuppositions. Allow things to mean whatever they do, or to remain mysterious or meaningless if that’s what they want. Avoid premature judgements of meaning.

Ultimately, the antidote to all eternalism is to understand, recognize, accept, and stabilize the complete stance: that meanings are always fluid, partial, changing, and vague.

Smearing meaning all over everything

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

The eternalist ploy smearing meaning all over everything hallucinates imaginary meanings, to avoid perceiving meaninglessness. That makes it similar to the ploy imposing fixed meanings, but whereas that deploys rigid categories, “smearing” is non-specific.

Smeared-around meanings are usually vague. If something is labelled “inappropriate”: how, and why, and what does that actually imply?

Smearing is also usually quite undiscriminating about which things get what meanings. The important thing is that everything means something. Smearing accepts nebulous meanings, but not meaninglessness.

For instance:

Traditional ways of knowing draw on the wisdom of nature, which the West has forgotten.

This is almost perfectly vague, but expresses a strong value judgement nonetheless. Not only does it devalue “the West,” it also attempts to rescue “traditional ways of knowing” from the sensible judgement that they are sometimes idiotic and virtually meaningless. “Nature” and “wisdom” are sufficiently hand-wavy that they can justify almost anything—especially if they are supposed to be “mysterious” (to unenlightened Westerners, at least).

Smearing is common in monist eternalism, whereas fixed meanings are more common in dualist eternalism. (See “The big three stance combinations” for an introduction to monist vs. dualist eternalism.) Monism denies specifics, whereas dualism fixates them. Smearing is typically justified by “intuition” (characteristic of monism), where fixed meanings are justified by categorical knowledge (characteristic of dualism).

Smeared meanings cause trouble in almost the same way as fixed ones. They fail to fit reality, so acting on them has bad outcomes. Relying on “traditional ways of knowing” to handle an Ebola outbreak is a really bad idea.

The antidote to smearing, as with imposing, is to find out what things actually mean. If you find yourself smearing a lot, learning to be clear and specific is helpful, and some rigorous intellectual work is called for. For imposing, the antidote is more to be receptive to your perceptions of meaning, moment-by-moment, and to allow them to be as they are.

Magical thinking

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

Magical thinking is hallucinating a causal connection where there is none.1 It includes ideas such as destiny, “messages from God” (or “from the universe”), belief in physical effects of “magical” acts, psychic powers, and so forth.

Magical thinking is a common form of patternicity. It is a common ploy for making eternalism seem workable when it is not.

Eternalism is the stance that everything has a fixed meaning. Magical thinking gives specific, wrong meanings to many meaningless events; and eternalism can be used as a theoretical framework for justifying the meanings given by magical thinking. (“It’s not just a naturally-occurring omen, it’s a message from God!”) So there is a powerful synergy between eternalism and magical thinking. In fact, most major religions probably began as systematic appropriations of everyday magical thinking by elite eternalist priesthoods.

However, magical thinking is not necessarily eternalist. For example, believing homeopathy works, without giving it any spiritual significance, is magical thinking—but not eternalism. On the other hand, if you think homeopathy has something to do with cosmic Oneness, that is eternalistic.

Magical thinking causes harm when you act on mistaken causal beliefs and get bad results.

Part of the antidote to magical thinking is understanding that brains just naturally do it. You have to watch out for it. Once you see its patterns, catching it becomes automatic, and you can laugh at it.

Another part of the antidote is to learn how the world actually works.

  • 1. More precisely, magical thinking is belief in a causal connection without having an adequate epistemological basis. There are interesting borderline cases, such as nutritional “science”—which I write about later—for which the epistemological basis is contested. I am more skeptical of nutritional “science” than most people; and I also believe that it is heavily laden with covert moral claims, thereby attributing ethical meanings to food that it does not have. All this makes nutrition a fascinating contemporary example of eternalism, magical thinking, and the metastasis of ethics into domains where it has no legitimate business.

Hope

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

Hope springs eternal… istically.

Hope shifts imagined meaning to the future, when the present is obviously meaningless.

Hope is harmful in devaluing the present and shifting attention to imaginary futures that may never exist. Hope causes emotional stunting and childishness. It is inimical to emotional growth.

This page will discuss the putative value of hopeful illusions as defenses against anxiety, depression, and despair. (The logic of that is really that hope is an antidote to nihilism, which is seen as the only alternative. That’s a different ploy.) It may function as a useful defense in emergencies, but illusion is counter-productive as a long-term or general strategy.

Even in crises, hope can be harmful. Since eternalism consists of blindness to nebulosity, it is destabilized by anything that brings nebulosity to our attention. Fortunately, nebulosity is indirectly visible in everyday life: as uncertainty, surprise, endings, confusion, breakdowns, and disagreement.

Unfortunately, when in the eternalist stance, it is usually only negative manifestations of nebulosity that can shock us out of blindness. Generally that leads to nihilism rather than the complete stance. This happens for all of us, frequently. “Damn, I seem to have inadvertently offended that person I met recently who I hoped might be a friend. Oh, well, I guess it was pointless to try anyway.” More dramatically, personal crises (such as the death of a family member) are probably the most common triggers for crises of religious faith.

Crisis, by destabilizing eternalism, can be an opening into either nihilism or the complete stance. We should prepare for this. In a crisis, we generally get caught up in strategic suffering, i.e. frantically trying to get the world to go back to behaving the way we think it ought to. It is difficult then to think about what may seem like abstract philosophical concerns. Knowing that unwanted events are likely to tip us into nihilism, knowing how to recognize nihilism as we shift into it, and knowing the antidotes to nihilism, is a first step.

I will discuss, in passing, hope as a Christian “theological virtue.” This is hope specifically for salvation. It derives from will, not from the passions.

The antidote to hope is active acceptance of the present as it is, and prospective acceptance of the future, however it will be.

I have written about this from a Buddhist perspective at "Charnel ground" and "Pure Land"—a pair of essays that are best read together.

Pretending

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

Eternalism is so obviously wrong that it can’t fool anyone completely or consistently. We always know better, at some level.

That means eternalism always contains an element of make-believe. Every eternalist thought, speech, and act feels like children putting on eye patches and pretending to be pirates, launching daring raids on the cookie jar from a corvette that looks suspiciously like the dining room table.

Eternalist systems often explicitly demand suspension of disbelief (“you gotta believe!”). This is as true of eternalist political systems as of monotheist religions.

Pretending, like hope, is harmfully anti-growth. It causes emotional and intellectual stunting; childishness.

The antidote, as for kitsch, is realism. Just stop pretending.

Colluding for eternalism

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

Because eternalist delusion is so desirable, we collude to maintain it. We implicitly agree to agree to whatever meanings our social group comes up with. We support each other in not-seeing the nebulosity that contradicts those meanings. We choose not to mention it; to distract each other from it; to pretend the elephant of meaninglessness is not taking up most of the room.

This is genuinely compassionate activity. We all want to save each other from nihilism.

People are often passionately attached to some eternalist system or other, but the details are insignificant. All that matters is that they hold nebulosity at bay. It’s common for people to switch from intense commitment to one political ideology, or religion, to another. What they seek is a supportive social group that confirms that everything makes sense.

Since the details don’t matter, those are typically delegated to the leaders of an eternalism-based institution, such as a church or political party. Such institutions are tools for organizing eternalist collusion.1

The antidote to collusion is pointing out nebulosity. As an individual, one can smile and remain silent when someone tries to get you to agree that everything is meaningful; and that is usually best. However, changing the social dynamic does require active contradiction.

This is quite tricky, and must be done skillfully. There are always ethical complexities in trying to change other people. Switching away from eternalism is one of the most profound changes anyone can make; and it can easily lead into nihilism, which may be worse. So the stakes are quite high.

The Angry New Atheists and the Speculative Realists seem examples of un-skillful contradiction. The tirades of the Angry Atheists are tinged with nihilistic rage and intellectualization; Speculative Realism is tinged with nihilistic anxiety, depression, and intellectualization. This is unhelpful (although the New Atheists overall have probably done much good.) As with all attempts to change people’s political or religious opinions, the tendency is to score points to enhance your status in your in-group, rather than to sincerely engage with the people you are trying to convert in order to help them.

Humor is the best method for demonstrating nebulosity and meaninglessness. Not “jokes” as such, but pointing out how cute it is when meaning and meaninglessness, pattern and nebulosity, play together like puppies, nipping and tickling each other, tumbling over and over.

  • 1. The Guru Papers provides much insight into the workings of eternalist social groups.

Hiding from nebulosity

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

Hiding from nebulosity is the first of several eternalist ploys that blind you to evidence of meaninglessness. (Previous pages in this section discussed ploys that allow you to hallucinate meaning where there is none—a related but different strategy.)

This ploy attempts to physically avoid nebulous situations and information.

It’s difficult to apply this ploy as an individual. It’s more effective when applied by social groups (such as religious sects or fringe political movements).

Extreme examples are closed cults, which try to isolate their members from anything that contradicts their eternalist beliefs.

Hiding doesn’t work well. Even in a cult compound, you can’t separate yourself from the obvious meaninglessness of everyday randomness.

Attempts to hide leave you narrow and fearful.

The antidote is to allow, or even actively seek, nebulosity. Experiment with odd media, anomalous situations, and unfamiliar social groups or cultures. Learn to enjoy not understanding quite what is going on.1

(This is related to the method “eating the shadow” I’ve written about elsewhere.)

Nebulosity provokes anxiety, so one should not rush this process. Sensible care is called for.

Kitsch and naïveté

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

Kitsch is one of the main ploys of eternalism. In Milan Kundera’s memorable phrase, “kitsch is the denial of shit”. For “shit” we can substitute nebulosity, which eternalism finds unacceptable. Kitschy eternalism simply refuses to see meaninglessness, even where it is obvious.

This leads to a willfully idiotic sentimentality. We try to live in a pastel-colored Disneyfied world in which everything works out for the best in the end, everyone is well-intentioned (although sometimes confused), there is a silver lining in every cloud, everyone is beautiful inside, when life gives you lemons you make lemonade, and all the world needs is love. 1

Kitsch is a refusal to seriously engage with spiritual problems. Any anomalies are dismissed as being due to finite human understanding of God’s benevolent intent. Reasonable faith is replaced with credulousness.

False and exaggerated emotion is characteristic of eternalist kitsch.

The antidote to kitsch

The antidote to kitsch is realism: the acknowledgement of shit. Realism requires no particular method or insight; merely willingness. Kitsch is idiotic because we always know better; we just don’t want to admit it.

The danger in applying this antidote—and a reason we fear to do so—is that we may conclude that everything is shit. That, however, is nihilism. We must acknowledge both nebulosity and pattern. The term “kitsch” comes from art criticism; it describes “art” that is self-consciously “beautiful” or sweet. Art that is self-consciously ugly and repellent is equally false, and in recent decades has become equally trite. Authentic art acknowledges the inseparability of light and darkness, and can be a path to non-duality.

  • 1. According to the Talmud, every blade of grass has its own angel that watches over it and encourages it to grow. Isn’t that darling?

Armed & armored eternalism

Archangel Michael defeating Satan (Guido Reni, 1635)

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Arming and armoring oneself is a ploy for maintaining eternalism. When nebulosity is obvious, eternalism fails to fit reality. The response is to armor oneself against evidence, and to arm oneself to destroy it.

Kitschy sentimentality can serve as armor against recognizing nebulosity. We blind ourselves to mystery; we try to make the world small and comfortable; and suffer when we encounter vastness.

The cost of armoring is blindness to opportunity. Much good is left undone because an eternalist code did not recommend it, and much harm is done because the code required it. Less obviously, but perhaps even more importantly, we lose the freedom of courage: the freedom to risk, to take actions whose results we cannot predict. Armored eternalism condemns such creativity.

When sentimentality feels threatened, it turns ugly—because the function of sentimentality is self-protection. Confronted with evidence that our code is imperfect, we retreat to a harsher, more restrictive code, and seek to impose it on the uncooperative world as well as ourselves. We become censorious and self-righteous.

When the armor wears thin, we crank it up into melodrama. We make ourselves up as heroes in the cosmic struggle between good and evil. Alas: those who are too sure they are on the side of God are capable of the greatest evil. Armed eternalism results in hostility, punishment of self and others, narrowness, bitterness, and brittleness.

When the supposed Cosmic Plan collides with what is decent and sensible, one either does the apparently right thing, which erodes one’s commitment to eternalism, or one follows the prescription. If that has a bad outcome, one must blind oneself to the failure. We do that by hardening ourselves, and often also by hardening our interpretation of the code—against the temptation to weaken it to fit reality.

Eternalism makes you think “nice” people will behave the way you want them to. When they don’t, you demonize them, and try to control or punish them. In fact, Kundera’s theory of kitsch was motivated by his analysis of totalitarian communism in his native Czechoslovakia; totalitarianism, he concluded, is kitsch in government.

In the pathological extreme, armed eternalism sees any deviation as a threat that must be destroyed, and becomes sociopathic. We may launch witch-hunts, or conduct internal witch-hunts, scouring our own minds for evidence of sinful thoughts. Vast crimes have been justified in the name of eternalism: Inquisition, religious wars, and genocides.

Armed eternalism sees totalitarianism as the only defense against the nihilist apocalypse. (Of which, more in future chapters.) But the dichotomy between totalitarianism and apocalypse is false; due, as usual, to nihilism appearing to be the only alternative to eternalism.

The antidotes are relaxation and de-escalation. As you learn that nebulosity need not be negative, you can allow ambiguity increasingly. As you allow ambiguity, there is less and less need to war against evidence of it.

Faith

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Faith is an eternalist ploy for blinding yourself to nebulosity. It means explicitly choosing to ignore experience or reason when they contradict eternalism. This need not be faith in any particular belief or system, but simply in certainty that there is some meaningful order to everything.

Faith implies dumbing yourself down, and looking for external authority to affirm eternalism over reality as you can perceive it.

The antidote is regaining self-trust and intelligence by learning, through experience, that personal observation and reasoning can yield accurate understanding.

Thought suppression

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Thought suppression is the eternalist ploy that hides nebulosity and meaninglessness simply by rejecting thoughts that would make them obvious.

The thought “maybe everything is meaningless” might be intolerable. In your experience, it may lead immediately to full-blown nihilism. So you choose not to think it.

It’s hard to choose never to think of something. (“Don’t think of a pink elephant.”) To suppress a thought effectively, you have to recognize warning signs that it’s coming. For instance, there are thoughts that tend to lead you to the one you want to avoid. “Maybe there’s nothing in particular I’m meant do with my life” can lead to “so maybe everything is meaningless” (although it need not). So it’s better not to think that either. And “I don’t really know what I’m meant to do with my life” leads to “maybe nothing,” so better not think that.

Since meaninglessness is so common, a multitude of observations and thoughts could eventually lead you to the wrong conclusion that everything is meaningless. The more often you apply thought suppression, the wider the domains of experience you have to blank.

Thought-terminating clichés

One tactic for stopping an unwanted train of thought is to apply a counter-thought.1 Among these are thought-terminating clichés.

A cliché is a fixed thought that ends an authentic line of inference. For example: “everyone is put on earth for a reason.” That ends patterns of thinking that might lead to “nothing really has any purpose.” This thought is not something you are likely to come up with yourself; it’s part of the thought soup of our culture. You hear someone “wise” saying it when you are teenager, and take it over as your own. There’s no good reason to believe it, but you accept it originally on authority and then because it makes you feel better.

Here are some more examples:

  • There is someone for everyone.
  • His time had come, I guess.
  • Everything happens for the best.
  • Everything is part of the unfolding plan for the universe.
  • God works in mysterious ways.

The term “thought-terminating cliché” comes from Robert J. Lifton’s Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. This book has useful insights into several of the eternalist ploys. He writes:

“The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis. In [Chinese Communist] thought reform, for instance, the phrase ‘bourgeois mentality’ is used to encompass and critically dismiss ordinarily troublesome concerns like the quest for individual expression, the exploration of alternative ideas, and the search for perspective and balance in political judgments. And in addition to their function as interpretive shortcuts, these cliches become what Richard Weaver has called “ultimate terms”: either “god terms,” representative of ultimate good; or “devil terms,” representative of ultimate evil. In thought reform, “progress,” “progressive,” “liberation,” “proletarian standpoints” and “the dialectic of history” fall into the former category; “capitalist,” “imperialist,” “exploiting classes,” and “bourgeois” (mentality, liberalism, morality, superstition, greed) of course fall into the latter. Totalist language then, is repetitiously centered on all-encompassing jargon, prematurely abstract, highly categorical, relentlessly judging, and to anyone but its most devoted advocate, deadly dull: in Lionel Trilling’s phrase, ‘the language of nonthought.’”

Punishing bad thoughts

Another tactic is punishing yourself for thinking unwanted thoughts.

Eternalist authorities recommend actively rooting about in your psyche to find bad (“sinful”) thoughts and punish them. These might be labelled as morally bad (so they deserve punishment); but they can be anything that contradicts the stance you are trying to maintain. For eternalism, lack of faith is a sin.

Harm

Thought suppression leads to deliberate stupidity.

Thought suppression can be involved in any confused stance. Every confused stance involves not-seeing something about meaning; suppressing thoughts that would lead to that could always help maintain the confusion. However, thought suppression is particularly characteristic of eternalism, because eternalism is particularly simple and stupid.

Thought suppression also leads to a sensation of claustrophobic imprisonment within a limited set of safe thoughts; of timidity in the face of the unfamiliar; and a strangled inability to express oneself.

A fascinating personal account of the harm of thought suppression was posted as a comment on this site.

Antidote

The antidote is to allow thoughts.

For this, mindfulness meditation may be particularly useful. That mainly consists of non-judgmental awareness of thoughts. Since thoughts are mostly just junk we’ve taken over from our culture, you can regard them as not-particularly-mine. Therefore, they don’t say anything about “me,” which makes them less frightening.

In practicing mindfulness meditation, you discover what you think. This comes as a surprise to everyone!

Bargaining and recommitment

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When eternalism collides with reality—as it eventually must—and causes needless suffering, you are tempted to abandon it. But eternalism is so attractive, and the apparent alternative—nihilism—so appalling that this is unacceptable. So a common ploy is to cut a deal.

You make a bargain with eternalism that it will behave better, and in return you will recommit to your faith in it. This bargain may be the product of negotiation over a period ranging from seconds to years.

Of course, the argument is entirely in your head. And, of course, eternalism has no intention of keeping its side of the deal.

Eternalism will let you down over and over—because the world isn’t actually as it promises. This can produce an addictive cycle. When vagueness and meaningless are less obvious, eternalism delivers its emotional rewards. When they are more obvious, chaos, confusion, pain and doubt arise. Then you wonder what you did wrong. You may punish yourself on eternalism’s behalf. You try to figure out how to make the good feelings come back. If only, you think, I could really believe. If only my life weren’t such a mess. I know! I’ll promise to believe again, if life promises to go back to normal.

The antidote is to use periods of doubt as productive openings in which you can switch to the complete stance. This requires understanding that nihilism is not the only alternative to eternalism, and some skill in avoiding the slide into nihilism.

It’s only possible to combat eternalism’s ploys effectively if you can also combat nihilism’s ploys. Otherwise, it’s out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Wistful certainty

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Wistful certainty, a ploy for maintaining the eternalist stance, follows this pattern of thinking:

There must be a…

For example,

  • There must be a God, or at least a Something
  • There must be a meaning to life
  • There must be a special purpose I was put here to fulfill
  • There must be a right ethical system
  • There must be a correct form of government
  • There must be a reason this happened
  • There must be a rational explanation for everything

“Wistful” certainty occurs when one can’t think of a reason there “must” be whatever it is. One is sure, however, because eternalism wouldn’t work if whatever it is weren’t true.

  • There must a God, or at least a Something, because otherwise: there would be nothing to hold meaning reliably in place.
  • There must be a meaning to life, because otherwise: it’s meaningless and I might as well kill myself.
  • There must be some special purpose I was put here to fulfill, because otherwise: I would be worthless.
  • There must be a right ethical system, because otherwise: I’d have no idea what to do.
  • There must be a correct form of government, because otherwise: there would be no way to guarantee justice.
  • There must be a reason this happened, because otherwise: the Cosmic Plan would be incomplete.
  • There must be a rational explanation for everything, because otherwise: the universe wouldn’t make sense.

This is wistful because one wishes one could think of a better justification than “or else eternalism would fail.” It is certain because the possibility of letting go of eternalism seems unthinkably awful.

Wistful certainty is the first of several ploys for explaining away non-perception of meaning. This is a little different from earlier ploys that hallucinate particular meanings, or that blind you to meaninglessness. In this third category of ploys, you are aware that you are not perceiving meaning.

Wistful certainty tends to lead to paralysis, because you believe you don’t have enough understanding to act accurately.

Wistful certainty can also lead to imposing fixed meanings or smearing random meanings around, as ways of resolving the anxiety of not-knowing.

The antidote is to remind yourself that many things are meaningless, or have inherently vague meanings, and that action is possible anyway.

Faithful bafflement

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Faithful bafflement is a ploy for maintaining the eternalist stance, closely related to wistful certainty. It admits a further quantum of doubt. It may feel anguished, rather than wistful:

  • I don’t know what I’m supposed to do!
  • I don’t know what it all means!
  • How can this have happened!

It is faithful, because you have not yet let go of eternalism. But where wistful certainty is sure there is some answer (though it is not visible), faithful bafflement starts to suspect there is no answer (though eternalism must somehow be correct anyway).

Like wistful certainty, faithful bafflement can lead to paralysis.

As with wistful certainty, the antidote is to use doubt as an opening. Existential crises force spiritual questions; they can lead into into pathological confusion, but they can also clarify meaningness and lead into the complete stance.

One tactic is to turn around the expression of bafflement, and to personalize it.

If you are upset about a moral choice and exclaim “I don’t know what I am supposed to do!”, ask yourself: “supposed by whom?”

This tactic works even for staunch atheists. We all have at the back of our minds a shadowy authority figure by whom we will be judged. It takes more than a current membership card in the Council for Secular Humanism to dispel that bogeyman. In calm and rational times he hides from the light of rationality, but in dark and troubled moments we feel his boney hand on our shoulder.

Instead of “I don’t know what it all means!” ask: “what does this mean to me? What does it mean to my family or community?”

Rather than trying to answer “How can this have happened!” in terms of the Cosmic Plan, you can look for a practical answer. And you can also remind yourself that many things happen for no reason at all.

Mystification

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Mystification is a ploy for maintaining the eternalist stance. Like wistful certainty, it is a tactic for explaining away non-perception of meaning. It is the next step when faithful bafflement fails.

Mystification uses thoughts as a weapon against authentic thinking. It creates glib, bogus metaphysical explanations that sweep meaninglessness under the rug. It can be vague, poetic, emotive (typical of monist mystification), or elaborately conceptual and intellectual (typical of dualist mystification).

Eternalist ideologies claim to have all the answers. However, when push comes to shove, they admit that some things are mysterious. In fact, the mysteries turn out to include all the major questions about each of the dimensions of meaningness.

Still, eternalist ideologies insist that it is not mysterious which things are mysterious; nor how they are mysterious; nor what the mystery means. One is not to inquire into that which is mysterious, to come to have a tentative opinion about it. Mystery is not allowed to be mysterious: We know everything about it, says eternalism.

In fact, according to this ploy, mystery always means the same thing: apparent meaninglessness is the very best proof that everything is meaningful. Everything mysterious is bundled together and labeled “sacred” or “miraculous” or “cosmic.” Or, more specifically, “God’s plan, not for man to know”; or “the historically-inevitable working-out of class struggle”; or “the uncomputable but optimal decision strategy.”

Mystification produces half-assed mumbo-jumbo explanations. Acting based on these fails—naturally!—with more-or-less disastrous results.

The antidote to mystification is actual thinking. “Actual thinking” means not simply repeating thoughts you have taken over from an ideology, but active curiosity and investigation and questioning and reasoning. It involves skepticism; not the pseudo-skepticism of rejecting claims your tribe rejects, but actively wondering about how things are, and refusing to accept attractive stories that make no sense.

Thinking is a skill. There are many specific methods, taught for example in the “critical thinking” curriculum, and it is worth learning them. It is also important to realize that thinking must go beyond method.

Recognizing meaninglessness can be an opening into vastness. That is what mystification promises—but then it delivers the opposite. It gestures at vastness, but immediately closes it off by labeling it, and by pretending to explain some ultimate insight into its nature.

The best antidote to mystification is to appreciate, and open to, the experience of vastness. That is wonderment.

Rehearsing the horrors of nihilism

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When most ploys for maintaining eternalism have failed, sometimes the best that can be said for it is that it is less bad than nihilism. And, if nihilism were indeed the only alternative, that might be true.

Reminding yourself of how bad nihilism is can help you maintain the eternalist stance. Reminding others of how bad it is can help stabilize them in the stance.

This is the hellfire and brimstone of eternalist preaching. It’s likely to produce fear and loathing.

Also, it can backfire. It’s hard to explain the harm of nihilism without explaining how nihilism works. Explaining nihilism is likely to make it seem plausible. So rehearsing nihilist horror can actually pop you into nihilism, rather than keeping you out!

The antidote to this ploy is to compare eternalism with the complete stance rather than with nihilism.

The nihilist apocalypse

This page, when finished, may introduce the nihilist apocalypse. I’ll definitely discuss that in several places later in the book, but this might be a good point to begin.

The nihilist apocalypse is the supposed catastrophe that would occur if nihilist views became widespread. In the imagination of some eternalists, eternalism is the only thing keeping the rabble in check. Nihilism, if widely adopted, leads to a world of total license, in which the masses naturally follow their basest instincts and engage in the worst sort of depravity.1 The dangerous idea that there are no absolute moral rules gradually spreads from the decadent intelligentsia to the coarse lower classes, who then lose all respect for authority, indulge in their natural promiscuity, breed like rabbits, play vile music, worship blood-drinking demons, casually commit rape and murder, tear down all institutions, destroy Western civilization, and let loose a wave of anarchy and violence that precipitates a thousand-year Dark Age.

Social breakdown is not impossible, and nihilistic ideas are indeed harmful to social cohesion. However, the apocalyptic worst-case fantasy is unrealistic. It’s highly exaggerated, precisely because eternalism is also unrealistic. Only extreme threats justify extreme solutions—and eternalism is extreme.

The nihilist apocalypse often features in the rhetoric of political and ethical eternalism.

  • 1. The worst sort of depravity involves aardvarks. Just so you know. The details can only be hinted at, of course. It’s probably best just to avoid aardvarks altogether.

Purification

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Purity is an obsessive focus for dualist eternalism. It mobilizes emotions of disgust, guilt, shame, and self-righteous anger.

The classic discussion is Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. There is also much useful analysis in The Guru Papers, which draws on Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism.

The purity obsession's harms are a narrowed scope of action, and various neuroses (avoidant-compulsive; superiority complex).

An effective antidote is deliberately playing with "impurity."

Fortress eternalism

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Eternalism is the confused stance that everything has a fixed meaning. Various ploys try to maintain that stance in the face of frequent evidence that most things do not have definite meanings. When these fail, a fallback is to try to maintain eternalism where it seems most critical or plausible, and wall that off from everything else, which you abandon to nebulosity.

It is difficult, for instance, to see how earthquakes, tsunamis, and famines could be willed by a benevolent God; or meaningful; or anything other than disasters that just happened. It is difficult not to fall into the stance that most things are God’s will, but not some bits that cause you trouble.

For the liberally-minded, it is common to abandon the view that life has a definite purpose, while continuing to insist that some particular scheme of ethics (utilitarianism, for instance) is definitely correct. Then one has abandoned eternalism in the dimension of purpose, while preserving it in the dimension of ethics.

Fortress eternalism has all the same defects and harms as full-on eternalism—within the territory you hold eternalistically. Also, if you misinterpret nebulosity as meaninglessness, then you are effectively a nihilist as far as anything outside your domain of safety is concerned; and you are subject to the harms of nihilism when you venture there.

Terrifyingly, as you try to tend your eternalist garden, you find the outer darkness encroaching. Areas of visible chaos inexorably expand. Having initially admitted a tiny bit of nebulosity, it spreads like a puddle of black ink—because in fact everything is nebulous. You can try to build dams, bulwarks against the encroaching tide, by redoubling commitment to eternalism; but you find that more and more of everyday life becomes the domain of nebulosity. Eternalist belief is increasingly relegated to Sunday morning. Increasingly, you become a nihilist in practice, even while maintaining commitment to eternalism in theory.

Since eternalism is the stance that everything has a fixed meaning, fortress eternalism is not really eternalism at all. This last-ditch ploy transitions you from eternalism to some next stance.

This is, actually, an opportunity to move to the complete stance. When the last defense finally collapses, you can see that all is nebulous. If you remember then that nebulosity is not meaninglessness, and recognize patterns of meaning remaining after eternalism has collapsed—you have found the complete stance.

Accomplishing eternalism

Ascended yogi

Accomplishing eternalism would would mean always knowing the fixed meaning of everything, and acting accordingly. That is impossible, because there are no fixed meanings. It’s also not possible to completely blind yourself to nebulosity, and not possible to always give in to the insane demands of supposed fixed meanings.

Mainstream Christianity recognizes this, actually, with the doctrine of original sin. It is not possible for humans to avoid sin. Everyone is sometimes in conflict with eternal meaning.

Some eternalist religious sects (typically termed the “mystical” branches) claim that accomplishment is possible. You can perfectly unify your self with the Cosmic Plan while in this life. This usually implies monism, and I’ll discuss such mysticism in detail in the monist chapter of Meaningness.

Some eternalistic political ideologies claim that collective accomplishment is inevitable; history guarantees utopia, eventually. Some non-political eternalist progress ideologies (versions of transhumanism, for instance) also say that accomplishment is at least possible in principle.

Exiting eternalism

Surreal image of exiting
Image courtesy Ubé

When the promises of eternalism are revealed as lies, when the harm it does becomes impossible to overlook—you exit.

Exit is rarely dramatic. Eternalism is so wrong that you drop it frequently, in the moment—but adopt it again a minute later. Stances are extremely unstable, and hard to maintain for long. Even if you are committed to an eternalistic system (a religion, for example), you ignore its claims about meaning many times a day, when they contradict practical reality.

If you are committed to a particular confused stance, growing understanding of its defects may lead eventually to a dramatic “deconversion experience”—of leaving a religious or non-religious eternalist system, for example. This book is mostly not about that.1 It’s about the unnoticed moment-to-moment movements of meaningness.

Exiting eternalism implies adopting an alternative stance toward meaningness.2 The specific way eternalism breaks down in a particular situation guides you into another stance, which seems to offer a solution.

This book advocates moving from confused stances (such as eternalism) to the complete stance. The complete stance is relatively inaccessible, so this is difficult at first. Generally one is tossed from one confused stance to another, without even noticing, much less understanding. A first step toward accomplishing the complete stance is noticing the transitions between other stances. Becoming aware of movements among stances, and what triggers them, helps you understand the emotional dynamics of each. Learning to recognize the promises a stance makes, and reflecting on its repeated failure to deliver, kills the allure for you—and then you can escape its grip.

Where you may go next

No exit
Also courtesy Ubé

Because eternalism is the simplest, most basic confused stance, you may transition from it to almost any other. Exiting one of the more specific stances, discussed later in the book, typically can lead to only a few others. I’ll discuss likely exit moves for each stance in the chapter about it. (The schematic overview of stances also lists the most likely next stances adopted when exiting each.)

From eternalism, there are three groups of stances you might move to: quasi-eternalistic stances, nihilism and quasi-nihilistic stances, and the complete stance.

The most closely allied stances are “circumscribed eternalisms.” These admit that some things are not meaningful, but insist on fixed meanings for others. For example, mission says that “mundane” purposes are meaningless, really, but insists that “eternal” purposes are ultimately meaningful. Such stances preserve much of the feeling-tone of eternalism. They are attractive when eternalism’s promises still seem generally plausible, but when its absolutism is obviously unworkable in a particular situation.

When a betrayal by eternalism leaves you feeling sick, nihilism or one of its allied stances may look more attractive. Outright nihilism is nearly impossible to maintain, but you can adopt it transiently. In the longer term, you might commit to some kind of Nihilism Lite, like materialism. Materialism (as I use the word in this book) is the stance that eternal purposes are meaningless, but mundane, material ones are real.

With practice, you can learn to avoid both these possibilities. Instead, when you notice you are in the eternalist stance—when you find yourself insisting on a fixed meaning—you can use that as a reminder to move to the complete stance.

Learning skillful exits

Altnabreac Station exit
Altnabreac Station exit image courtesy Rob Faulkner

This book aims to provide methods for deliberately moving out of wrong, dysfunctional stances into accurate, functional ones. Mostly, people seem unaware of the dynamics I describe, and so get pushed around helplessly, from one confused stance to the next, when difficulties arise. Instead, you can use moments of breakdown as openings to move on deliberately—ideally, to the complete stance. Troubles with meaning are valuable if you are prepared to transition and know where best to head. That requires understanding how all the stances work: what makes the confused ones attractive, how they inevitably fail, and why the complete stance is better. This takes intellectual understanding, thorough emotional familiarity, and then skill developed through repetitive practice.

Overall, the method could be described as destabilizing confused stances and stabilizing the complete stance.

  • Eternalism consists of denying nebulosity, so learning to recognize nebulosity is the general method for destabilizing the stance.
  • Since eternalism’s appeal is the promise of certainty, understanding, and control, realizing that it cannot deliver those destabilizes it.3
  • In the eternalist ploys section, I have also suggested antidotes for many more specific patterns of eternalist thinking, feeling, and action.
  • Just exiting eternalism is insufficient, though, if that simply drops you into another confused stance. Each needs its own antidotes—discussed later in the book.
  • The complete stance consists of acknowledging both nebulosity and pattern, so stabilizing it involves learning to appreciate mixtures of the two. That too must wait for later.
  • 1. There are many books advocating leaving theistic eternalism for atheism. They overlap in content with this book—but mostly only with this chapter.
  • 2. Could one take no stance at all? In some sense, the complete stance is that no-stance, because it does not limit meaningness in any way. That is what makes it “complete.” It allows meanings to be however they are, without metaphysical pre-commitment to their being one way or another.
  • 3. Realizing also that limited knowledge, understanding, and control are possible is an antidote to nihilism.

Non-theistic eternalism

Eternalism is the confused stance that everything has a definite meaning. The form of eternalism that is most obvious in the West is religion: supposedly, God makes everything meaningful. However, non-theistic eternalism may actually be more influential and more harmful.

Non-theistic eternalism has all the same defects as the religious varieties, but this is less well-known, and therefore harder to defend against. Freeing ourselves from theism is only a first step toward freeing ourselves from a host of ubiquitous, harmful, mistaken ideas about meaningness.

It is easy for atheists to feel smug and superior about our more accurate worldview. Yet we commonly slide into malign non-theistic eternalism, which is just as distorted, and causes just as much trouble, as religion.

It is always tempting to find some ultimate source of meaning. (Especially when it seems the only alternative would be nihilism.) That temptation leads directly to eternalism, with all the harm that entails.

Belief in the supernatural is harmful, but several modern eternalist systems are thoroughly naturalistic (or pretend to be, anyway). I believe it is not mainly supernaturalism that is harmful about religion, it is eternalism.

“Reason” was the first substitute proposed for God, back in the European Enlightenment, and it is still the most influential. Reason, after all, led us out of the nightmare of religion. What better to crown as the new ruler? It seems to make sense that the world would make sense—that there is a meaningful pattern to everything—and that, using rationality, we can discover it.

Clear thinking is always a good thing, but ideological concepts of rationality (or “Reason”) can distort it into an eternalism. Eternalist rationality has most of the same features as religion—the same attractions, harms, ploys, and antidotes. It cannot deliver on its shining promises, because the world doesn’t make complete sense. Reality is nebulous. Eternalist rationalism has to lie and cheat to hide that, and so commits violence against accurate perception.

Political ideologies can also substitute for religion. Meaning is mainly a social activity, and political theories claim to provide explanations for social interactions. Political ideologies say what the patterns of society are; what they mean; and what they should be. However, all social interaction is, in reality, nebulous. Therefore, political theories cannot deliver the utopias they promise. Reliably, instead, they deliver oppressive dystopias; sometimes, when taken sufficiently seriously, deliberate multi-megadeath catastrophes.

Among non-theistic eternalisms, I will analyze rationality and political ideology in some detail, running to several web pages each. However, I’ll also devote single pages to briefer coverage of eternalistic psychotherapeutic ideology, non-theistic Buddhist eternalism, and UFO cults.

Atheism: a good first step

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There is no God. I take that as given.

But atheism (and naturalism, and rationalism, and skepticism) are only the first step toward freeing ourselves from a host of similar, ubiquitous, harmful, mistaken ideas about meaning.

Most of the harm done by religion is not due to supernatural beliefs, but due to the eternalist stance. Non-supernatural eternalist systems are equally false and have the same malign emotional dynamics.

Atheists (particularly new ones) are especially susceptible to non-theistic eternalism, because of the experience of groundlessness when the supposed source of meaning is removed.

Then it is highly tempting to find some other ultimate source of meaning, as a bulwark against nihilism. In the next several pages, I’ll discuss several non-theistic alternatives to God, which are just as harmful.

Belief in belief

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People take for granted that they, and others, have beliefs—and that there is a non-problematic fact-of-the-matter about what they do and don’t believe. This is wrong; belief and beliefs are nebulous.

Eternalism’s promises of certainty, understanding, and control depend on belief in belief, and on knowledge as “justified true belief.” This is especially true for rationalist eternalisms, which descend from both Protestant and Enlightenment dualistic misunderstandings of belief as definite, non-nebulous entities.

Dan Kahan (among others) has done good recent work on clarifying how “belief” works in the wild.

How space aliens make everything meaningful

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UFO cults are a great counter-example to the rationalist assumption that religion’s faults stem from supernaturalism. UFO cults have all the same faults as other religions, but make only naturalistic claims. Naturally-occurring space aliens substitute for the gods and demons of supernatural religions.

Of course, these space aliens don’t exist, any more than gods and demons do. But that is exactly the point: the problem with religions is not that they are supernatural, but that they are wrong. And actually even that is not the problem. The problem is that they are harmful, because they are eternalistic. UFO cults, and alien abduction beliefs, are just as eternalistic as the big monotheisms; and that is why they mess people up.

Because they are so similar to primitive polytheisms, and so simple and familiar in their beliefs, UFO cults are a great case study in naturalistic eternalism. That makes them a useful background example for more sophisticated non-supernatural eternalisms.

Particularly, I’ll draw an analogy between UFO cults and singularitarianism. In some versions, singularitarianism is closely parallel to Christianity, with the supernatural God replaced with a hypothetical superintelligent computer program. Singularitarianism is a rationalist eternalist religion. It’s much more sophisticated than UFO cults, but structurally similar.

The emotional dynamics of specialness is a central feature of space alien beliefs (and of singularitarianism). Space aliens make contact with only a few humans. Because the aliens are superintelligent, they must have selected them for extremely good reasons. Even though space aliens perform sadistic sexual torture experiments on most contactees, those must have been very special people to have been chosen for the ordeal. Most are otherwise exceptionally ordinary people, with no obvious outstanding qualities. Their selection by UFO aliens validates their existence in a way that nothing else could.

One useful source is Susan A. Clancy’s Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens. From a review in Scientific American:

The book explains how individuals can have memories of events that never occurred and describes the types of people who are more likely to become believers. In a nutshell, they are fantasy-prone and are often unhappy and trying to make sense of their lives. The abduction provides a touchstone. At the very end, and with obvious reluctance, Clancy concludes that abduction beliefs provide “the same things that millions of people the world over derive from their religions: meaning, reassurance, mystical revelation, spirituality, transformation.”

Rationalist ideologies as eternalism

Rationalist eternalism is the confused stance that there is a pattern to everything, that all patterns can be discovered by reasoning, and that they give everything meaning. The universe is reasonable, and so reason can master it. This stance is wrong and harmful, just as other eternalisms are.

Rationality, understood and used properly, is a good thing. In the everyday sense, it is wise to think clearly and to act sensibly. My criticism of rationalist eternalism does not reject reason for emotionalism, or for some sort of anti-rational spirituality. I think anti-rational stances are also wrong and harmful. (I’ll analyze their faults later, in the chapter on monism, and in the discussion of the anti-rationalism of the 1960s-80s countercultures.)

In addition to good common sense, there are technical methods of reasoning that can be importantly useful sometimes. I will criticize their misuse, but I value technical rationality itself.

My argument against eternalist rationality is that reasoning does not, in fact, provide explanations or meanings for everything. Reality is nebulous, so that is impossible.

The exaggerated claims of ideological rationality are obviously and undeniably false, and are predictably harmful—just as with all eternalism. Yet they are so attractive—to a certain sort of person—that they are also irresistible.

Rationality and the Big Three stance combinations

The actual basis for rationalistic distortion is not eternalism. The root distortion is dualism, as I use the term in this book. Dualism, in this sense, is the insistence on boundaries; that everything must be definitely this or that, and not vaguely in-between.

The methods of rationality require specific categories. If you keep in mind that all categories are partially-arbitrary, artificial constructions, and cannot fully capture reality, the distortions they create may not cause problems. Ideological rationality tries to force reality to fit categories—and that does not end well.

It might make better sense to postpone discussion of rationality into the chapter on dualism. However, ideological rationality is such an important form of eternalism that I want to cover it here.

You may recall that there are three main stance combinations: dualist eternalism, monist eternalism, and dualist nihilism. Monist eternalism is anti-rational, because rationality depends on specifics, and monism denies specifics.

Both eternalism and nihilism are compatible with rationalism, and in practice rationalists tend to swing between the two. Actually, everyone tends to swing between the two, but for rationalists the alternation is often extreme and violent. That’s because clear thinking easily reveals the defects in both eternalism and nihilism. I will cover nihilist rationalism (or rationalization) later. And I will return to rationalism for further analysis in the dualism chapter.

Methods of rationality

You may have little interest in the technical methods of rationality, because you believe you understand their limits and faults and harms. You might even be a bit smug about that—but if you don’t understand in detail how formal rationality works, you are probably partly mistaken. You are probably, without knowing it, under the sway of Romanticism—an anti-rational eternalist ideology that is just as bad. Also, you are missing out on a good thing.

The methods of rationality are powerfully useful, and everyone should learn them, I think. As with all power tools, such as chainsaws, you also need to learn suitable safety procedures. The problem with rationality is not that it is technical. The problem is not anything about the methods themselves. The problem is metaphysical claims about the power of the methods to explain the unexplainable.

The pages in this section are somewhat technical. They are meant mainly for those who know at least a little about methods of formal reasoning. My intention is to point out potential dangers (ways rationality can distort into eternalism) and antidotes (ways to avoid sliding toward eternalism, or to escape from it when you find you have fallen in).

Wrong-way reductions

WRONG WAY sign

Wrong-way reduction is a logical fallacy no one seems to have pointed out before.1 Regular people rarely make this error on their own. It’s common for philosophers, cognitive scientists, and theologians. The wrong-way reductions made by these professionals escape into the general culture, and cause trouble for everyone else.

A wrong-way reduction is emotionally attractive when you have a problem that is nebulous—complicated, messy, and ambiguous. A wrong-way reduction claims to replace that with a simple, tidy, clear-cut problem. What’s wrong is that the new problem is harder than your original one—or even impossible! For a wrong-way reduction to seem useful, you must ignore this, and take the possibility of solving the new problem as a matter of faith.

The next page explains that most or all eternalist systems depend on wrong-way reductions. Eternalism denies nebulosity, and tries to use wrong-way reduction as a way to sweep nebulosity under the rug.

This is particularly common and obvious in rationalist eternalism. I will explore several examples in following pages, including logicism, Bayesianism, and utilitarianism.

One problem reduces to another if the second problem is easier, and a solution for the second is most of a solution for the first.2

An informal example: Suppose you want to get from your home in rural California to Athens, Georgia. There are many ways you could do that, some harder than others. Most of this problem can be solved by taking an airplane from San Francisco to Atlanta. This leaves only the easier problems of getting to and from the airports. What’s “reduced” here is the difficulty of the journey.

A more technical example (which you can skip): the best way to find the least common multiple of two numbers is to reduce the problem to finding their greatest common denominator. For two numbers x and y, LCM(x, y) = xy ÷ GCD(x, y). There are efficient ways to find the GCD. There are other ways to find the LCM, but they are less efficient than finding the GCD and multiplying.

Reduction, the wrong way

A wrong-way reduction transforms an easier problem into a harder one.

An example: Suppose you want to predict the outcome of a sportsball game. One approach would be to try to predict the number of goals that will be scored by each team. Then you could simply compare the two numbers to see which is greater.

This reduction goes the wrong way, because it is much easier to predict who will win the game than to predict exact scores.

Metaphysically motivated wrong-way reductions

Why would anyone make this sort of mistake?

If you wrongly believe that the second problem is easier than the first, this is not a logical fallacy. It’s an honest error of fact.

However, wrong-way reductions are often motivated errors, driven by wrong metaphysical attitudes. Often wrong-way reductions are advocated by people who know that the second problem is harder—or even impossible!

Wrong-way reductions are usually motivated by eternalism, the denial of nebulosity. Eternalists are unwilling to accept the inherent messiness, ambiguity, and uncertainty of life. Eternalists try to turn messy, ambiguous, and uncertain (but workable) problems into tidy, clear, certain ones—even when those are entirely insoluble.

Here’s an example. Divine command ethics turns the difficult problem of choosing how to act into the impossible problem of knowing God’s will. Ethics gets messy when different ethical considerations point in different directions in a single situation. Then it may appear that God has given contradictory instructions. How then to resolve the ambiguity? Honest theologians admit—when pushed hard enough—that it may be impossible to know what God wants then.

To cope with the cognitive dissonance of relying on the impossible to cope with the merely difficult, eternalists produce evasions, obfuscations, and denials. These boil down to an “if”: if we knew what God wanted, then that would be a simple, infallible guide to correct action. The fact that we don’t know gets passed over quickly, hoping you won’t notice.

This example is slightly contrived, mainly because divine command ethics has so many other defects that knowing God’s will gets barely mentioned in discussions of this ethical approach. I chose it because it’s so simple and so obviously unworkable.

The next several pages explore more sophisticated, non-theistic examples of the same pattern.

  • 1. This seems odd. Have I missed something?
  • 2. Here I am using “reduction” as it is used in mathematics, not as it is used in the philosophy of science. The other sense of “reduction” involves explaining a material phenomenon in terms of an understanding about another, “lower level” one. Most scientific reductions are not mathematical ones.

Eternalisms as wrong-way reductions

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An eternalism is a belief system based on some eternal ordering principle that supposedly gives everything a definite meaning. It can be useful to look at eternalisms as wrong-way reductions: they turn somewhat-difficult problems into more difficult (or impossible) ones.

Obviously, wrong-way reduction is worse than useless. However, it can be emotionally compelling, as a way to deny nebulosity. The aim is to turn a messy problem into a tidy one. Rationalists are particularly averse to mess, and may be willing to overlook the fact that the new tidy problem is provably insoluble.

In religious eternalisms, the ordering principle (often personified as God) is supposed to act autonomously. In that case, one can imagine the principle fulfilling eternalism’s promises of certainty, understanding, and control without humans having to do the work. This is not a wrong-way reduction; it “reduces” a hard problem to maintaining faith, which is easier (although ineffective).

In a rationalist eternalism, certainty, understanding, and control must be available to us directly. And so we must be able to get certainty, understanding, control of the principle itself, by rational means. For example, utilitarianism is supposed to deliver certainty, understanding, and control of ethics, through mathematical calculation.

Unfortunately, the utilitarian calculations are more difficult than effective moral reasoning, so this is a wrong-way reduction. More generally, in other rationalist eternalisms, the problem of accessing the eternal ordering principle is more difficult than solving the practical problems the eternalism is supposed to address. In fact, in each case, it is outright impossible—and has to be.

Rationalist eternalism promises to eliminate nebulosity, so it is attractive when nebulosity is unattractive. However, nebulosity is a brute fact that cannot be eliminated; and so no eternal ordering principle can exist. Rationalist eternalism fails precisely because of its attractive promise.

The rationalist eternalist proposition is: “If we can just eliminate nebulosity using math, then solving the actual problem will be easy, at least in principle.” But mathematics can’t eliminate nebulosity, so this is always a wrong-way reduction.

Logic as eternalism

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Gottlob Frege
Gottlob Frege, 1848–1925, invented modern logic

Logic was the main theory of rationality for thousands of years. It is now discredited and abandoned; quaint and decayed; so perhaps it is not so important to write about.

I devoted years of my youth to logic, and I remain fond of it, despite having assisted Brutus in its assassination, and even drawing a little blood myself in its final moments. So I will discuss it here, and in many other places in Meaningness; not altogether seriously, but with a mixture of nostalgia and historical distance, contempt and affection.

As a species of eternalism, logic is a wrong-way reduction. It replaces difficult problems of practical reasoning with the impossible problem of logical deduction.

The continuum gambit

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The continuum gambit is a mathematical approach to eternalism—the denial of nebulosity. When it becomes obvious that things are not either this or that, but somewhat both and neither—a typical manifestation of nebulosity—the continuum gambit suggests that reality is a matter of shades of gray, corresponding to numbers on a continuous scale.

Often, modeling a phenomenon as a continuum works well. Often, it’s actively misleading instead. Even when it works well in practice, a continuum is rarely (if ever) how the phenomenon actually works.

The continuum gambit attempts to preserve eternalism in the face of nebulosity by confusing a mathematical model with reality.

For example, probability theory models uncertainty with a continuum, thereby attempting to regain certainty at a meta level, and to reassert optimal control with decision theory. As a practical tool, probability theory is sometimes extremely effective—and sometimes totally useless. (“Knightian uncertainty” is not amenable to probabilistic modeling.)

Bayesianism is the eternalistic insistence that probability theory is always applicable, and even that it is a complete account of rationality or epistemology. (“Probability theory does not extend logic” is a technical refutation of one of the sources of this delusion.)

Fuzzy set theory applies the continuum gambit to the problem of the nebulosity of categories. (Nebulous categories will be a major topic in the dualism chapter.) Whereas probability theory is often at least useful in practice, fuzzy set theory fails almost completely.

Similarly, utilitarianism attempts to dispel the nebulosity of ethics using the continuum gambit. This can’t work, and doesn’t.

Bayesianism is an eternalism

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Bayesianism is a rationalist ideology that attempts to rescue eternalism’s promise of certainty, in the face of nebulosity, with probability theory. This is an instance of the continuum gambit. It is a wrong-way reduction inasmuch as it requires you to somehow assign a real number to every possible hypothesis, which is much more difficult than actually effective ways of dealing with uncertainty.

It is widely noted that Bayesianism operates as a quasi-religious cult. This is not just my personal hobby-horse.

Debunking Bayesianism is a complex, technical subject. I’ve refuted one of its specific mistaken claims in “Probability theory does not extend logic.” I’ve made some more general, off-hand, preliminary remarks here and in “How to think real good.”

To deflect some classes of possible objections from Bayesians:

  • I will not take any position on the truth of Bayesian vs. frequentist metaphysics.
  • I will not take any position on the usefulness of Bayesian vs. frequentist statistical methods.
  • I will not argue that Bayesian methods are not sometimes useful in practice.

None of those are relevant. The point, rather, is that Bayesianism promises meta-certainty, but cannot deliver.

Probability theory does not extend logic

The Hunting of the Snark

The marriage of empiricism and rationality

Mainstream epistemology—the theory of how we can know things—has two principles: empiricism and rationality. “Empiricism” means that knowledge is based on perception; “rationality” means that knowledge is based on sound reasoning.

Not so long ago, there were believed to be other bases for reliable knowledge: tradition, scripture, and intuition. All five of these competed with each of the others. So rationalists and empiricists were enemies, and it seemed both could not be right. However, in the late 1800s, rationalism and empiricism allied, and killed the other three. The two joined in the holy matrimony of the Scientific Worldview.

This marriage seems happy enough. Indeed, it’s obvious to any working scientist that both are indispensable. It is little-noticed that no contract was drawn up, and the terms of the union are undefined. Perhaps this is a motivated ignorance; why risk upset?

Dropping the flowery metaphors: we have no coherent explanation for how rationality and empiricism relate to each other—even though philosophers have worked hard to find one for several centuries. I find this mysterious and exciting, because I suspect that neither rationality nor empiricism is a good account of knowledge, separately or combined. That opens the possibility for alternative, more accurate explanations.

That is a big topic. This page concentrates on one small aspect: the relationships among mathematical logic, probability theory, and rationality in general. (A terminological point: confusingly, reasoning and empiricism are now often referred to together as “rationality.”) Mathematical logic is the modern, formal version of rationality in the narrow sense, and probability theory is the modern, formal version of empiricism.

It is sometimes said that probability theory extends mathematical logic from dealing with just “true” and “false” to a continuous scale of uncertainty. Some have said that this is proven by Cox’s Theorem. These are both misunderstandings, as I’ll explain below. In short: logic is capable of expressing complex relationships among different objects, and probability theory is not.

A more serious corollary misunderstanding is that probability theory is a complete theory of formal rationality; or even of rationality in general; or even of epistemology.

In fact, logic can do things probability theory can’t. However, despite much hard work, no known formalism completely unifies the two! Even at the mathematical level, the marriage of rationality and empiricism has never been fully consummated.

Furthermore, probability theory plus logic cannot exhaust rationality—much less add up to a complete epistemology. I’ll end with a very handwavey sketch of how we might make progress toward one.

Plan

I hope to dispel misunderstandings by comparing the expressive power of three formal systems. In reverse order:

  • Predicate calculus—the usual meaning of “logic”—can describe relationships among multiple objects.
  • Aristotelian logic can describe only the properties of a single object.
  • Propositional calculus cannot talk about objects at all.

Probability theory can be viewed as an extension of propositional calculus. Propositional calculus is described as “a logic,” for historical reasons, but it is not what is usually meant by “logic.”

Cox’s Theorem concerns only propositional calculus. Further, it was well-known long before Cox that probability theory does extend propositional calculus.

Informally, probability theory can extend Aristotelian logic as well. This is usually unproblematic in practice, although it squicks logicians a bit.

Probability theory by itself cannot express relationships among multiple objects, as predicate calculus (i.e. “logic”) can. The two systems are typically combined in scientific practice. In specific cases, this is intuitive and unproblematic. In general, it is difficult and an open research area.

These misunderstandings probably originate with E. T. Jaynes. More about that toward the end of this page.

“Expressive power” is about what a system allows you to say. A possible objection to probability theory as an account of rationality is that it is too expensive to compute with. This essay is not about that problem. Even if all computation were free, probability theory could not reason about relationships, because it can’t even represent them.1

Propositional calculus

Propositional calculus is the mathematics of “and,” “or,” and “not.” (“Calculus” here has nothing to do with the common meaning of “calculus” as the mathematics of continuous change: derivatives and integrals.) There is not much to say about “and,” “or,” and “not,” and not much you can do with them. (You can skip to the next section if you know this stuff.)

A “proposition,” for propositional calculus, is something that is either true or false. As far as this system is concerned, there is nothing more to a proposition than that. Particularly, propositional calculus is never concerned with what a proposition is about. It is only concerned with what happens when you combine propositions with “and,” “or,” and “not.” It symbolizes these three with ∧, ∨, and ¬, respectively.

So let’s consider some particular proposition, which we’ll call p. All we can say about it is that it is either true or false. Regarding ¬, we can say that if p is true, then ¬p is false. Also, if p is false, then ¬p is true. Thus endeth the disquisition upon negation. (Perhaps you are not enthralled so far.)

Consider two propositions, p and q. If both p and q are true, then p∧q is true. If either of them is false, then p∧q is false. (Surprised?) That’s all that can be said about ∧.

You’ll be shocked to learn that if either p or q is true, then p∨q is true; but if both of them are false, then p∨q is false.

From these profound insights, we can prove some important theorems. For example, it can be shown that p∧¬p is false, regardless of whether p is true or false. (You may wish to check this carefully.)

Likewise, it can be shown that p∨¬p is true, regardless of whether p is true or false. In other exciting news, it turns out that p∧p is true if p is true, and false if not. Moreover, p∧q is true if, and only if, q∧p is true!

There are a half dozen banalities of this sort in total; and they exhaust the expressive power of propositional calculus.

Propositional calculus and “logic”

Propositional calculus is extremely important; it’s the rock bottom foundation for all of mathematics. But by itself, it’s also extremely weak. It’s useful to understand only for its role in more powerful systems.

Propositional calculus can’t talk about anything. As far as it knows, propositions are just true or false; they have no meaning beyond that.

The grade school example of logic is this syllogism:

(a) All men are mortal.

(b) Socrates is a man.

Therefore:

(c) Socrates is mortal.

We can capture the “therefore” in propositional calculus.2 Its symbol is →. It turns out that p→q is equivalent to (¬p)∨q. (You may need to think that through if you aren’t familiar with it. Consider each of the cases of p and q being true and false. If p is true, then ¬p is false, so q has to be true to make (¬p)∨q true. If p isn’t true, then ¬p is true, and then it doesn’t matter whether q is true or false.)

So we could try to write the syllogism, in propositional calculus, as (a∧b)→c. But this is not a valid deduction in propositional calculus. As far as it knows, a, b, and c are all independent, because it has no idea what any of them mean. The fact that a and b are both about men, and b and c are both about Socrates, is beyond the system’s ken.

For this calculus, propositions are “atomic” or “opaque.” You aren’t allowed to look at their internal structure. Propositional calculus has no numbers; no individuals, no properties, no relationships; nothing except true, false, and, or, and not. Most important, it has no way of reasoning from generalizations (“all men are mortal”) to specifics (“Socrates is mortal”).3

For historical reasons, propositional calculus is described as “a logic,” and is sometimes called “propositional logic.” But it is not what mathematicians or philosophers mean when they talk about “logic.” They mean predicate calculus, a different and immensely more powerful system.

Probability theory extends propositional calculus

Probability theory can easily be seen as an extension of propositional calculus to deal with uncertainty. In fact, the axiomatic foundations of the two were developed in concert, in the mid–1800s, by Boole and Venn among others. It was obvious then that the two are closely linked.

This section sketches the way probability theory extends propositional calculus, in case you are unfamiliar with the point. You can skip ahead if you already know this.

Probabilities are numbers from 0 to 1, where 1 means “certainly yes,” 0 means “certainly no,” and numbers in between represent degrees of uncertainty. When probability theory is applied in the real world, probabilities are assigned to various sorts of things, like hypotheses and events; but the math doesn’t specify that. As far as the math is concerned, there are just various thingies that have probabilities, and it has nothing to say about the thingies themselves. Just as in propositional calculus, probability theory doesn’t let you “look inside” them. In fact, one common way of applying probability theory is to say that the thingies are, indeed, propositions.

An event is something that either happens, or doesn’t. If e is an event, we symbolize its probability as P(e). We can symbolize the other possibility—that e doesn’t happen—as ¬e. It is certain that either e or ¬e will happen, so P(e) + P(¬e) = 1. Rearranging, P(¬e) = 1 – P(e). If e is certain, then P(e) = 1, so P(¬e) = 0, i.e. certainly false.

Suppose f is another event, which can happen only if e doesn’t happen. For example, if e is a die coming up 3, and f is the die coming up 4, then they are mutually exclusive. In that case, P(e∨f), the probability that the die comes up either 3 or 4, is P(e)+P(f). (For a six-sided die, that is 1/6+1/6=1/3.)

Suppose two events are “independent”: approximately, there is no causal connection between them. For example, two dice rolling should not affect each other. Let’s say e is the first die coming up 3, and g is the second one coming up 3. In that case, the probability that they will both come up 3, P(e∧g) = P(e) × P(g), which is 1/6 × 1/6 = 1/36.4

What is the probability that at least one die comes up 3? These are not mutually exclusive, so it is not simply the sum. It is P(e∨g) = P(e) + P(g) – P(e∧g), or 1/3 – 1/36. “At least one” includes “both,” and we have to subtract that out.

So, taken together, we see a simple and intuitive connection between probability and the operations of propositional calculus.

Cox’s Theorem

Cox’s Theorem concerns this relationship between propositional calculus and probability theory. It is irrelevant to the question “does probability theory extend logic” because:

  1. Propositional calculus is not “logic” as that is usually understood.
  2. It was well-known for decades before Cox that probability theory does extend propositional calculus.5

So you can probably just skip the rest of this section. However, since some people have misunderstood Cox’s Theorem as proving that probability theory includes all of logic, and is therefore a complete theory of rationality, I’ll say a little more about it.

Cox’s Theorem was an attempt to answer the informal question: Is there something like probability theory, but not quite the same?

This sort of question is often paradigm-breaking in mathematics. Is there something like Euclid’s geometry, but not quite the same? Yes, there are non-Euclidian geometries; and they turn out to be the mathematical key to Einsteinian relativity. Are there things that are like real numbers but not quite the same? Yes; complex numbers, for example, which have endless applications in pure mathematics, physics, and engineering.

So if there were something like probability theory, but not the same, we’d want to know about it. It might be extremely useful, in unexpected ways. Or, it might just be a mathematical curiosity.

Alternatively, if we knew that there is nothing similar to probability theory, then we’d have more confidence that using it is justified. We know probability theory often gives good results; if there’s nothing else like it, then we don’t have to worry that some other method would give better ones.

To answer the question, we need to say precisely what “like” would mean. (Probate law is “like” probability theory in some ways, but not ones we care about.) One approach is to define “what probability theory is like”; and then we can ask “are there other things that are like that?” So, what properties of probability theory are important enough that anything “like” it ought to have them?

This is not a mathematical question; it’s just a matter of opinion. Different people have different, reasonable opinions about what’s important about probability theory. The answer to “is there anything else like probability theory?” comes out differently depending on what properties you think something else would have to have to count as “like.”

When Cox was writing, in the 1940s, definitely nothing “like” probability theory was known. So he wanted to prove that indeed this would remain true.

Probably everyone would agree that anything “like” probability theory has to be a method for reasoning about uncertainty. So Cox started by asking: what would everyone intuitively agree has to be true about any sane method? For one thing, everyone would agree that in cases of certainty, any method ought to accord with propositional calculus; and that in cases of near-certainty, it ought to nearly accord. So, for instance, if q is nearly certain, then q∨p should also be nearly certain.

So Cox’s plan was to start with a handful of such intuitions, and show that probability theory is the only system that satisfies them. And, he thought he had done that.

Unfortunately, there are technical, philosophical, and practical problems with his result. I will mention some of these, but only briefly—because the whole topic is irrelevant to my point.

Technically, Cox’s proof was simply wrong, and the “Theorem” as stated is not true. Various technical fixes have been proposed, yielding revised, accurate theorems with similar content.

Philosophically, it is unclear that all his requirements were intuitive. For example, the proof requires negation to be a twice-differentiable function. Some authors do not consider twice-differentiability an “intuitive” property of negation; others do.

It is also controversial what the (fixed-up) mathematical result means philosophically. Whereas in 1946, when Cox published his Theorem, there clearly was nothing else like probability theory, there are now a variety of related mathematical systems for reasoning about uncertainty.

These share a common motivation. Probability theory doesn’t work when you have inadequate information. Implicitly, it demands that you always have complete confidence in your probability estimate,6 like maybe 0.5279371, whereas in fact often you just have no clue. Or you might say “well, it seems the probability is at least 0.3, and not more than 0.8, but any guess more definite than that would be meaningless.”

So various systems try to capture this intuition: sometimes a specific numerical probability is unavailable, but you can still do some reasoning anyway. These systems coincide with probability theory in cases where you are confident of your probability estimate, and extend it to handle cases where you aren’t.

Some advocates of probability theory point to Cox’s Theorem as reason to dismiss alternatives. Is that justified? It is not a mathematical reason; the alternatives are valid as mathematical systems. It’s a philosophical claim that depends on intuitions that reasonable people disagree about.

Practically, what we want to know is: are there times when we should use one of the alternatives, instead of probability theory?

This is an empirical, engineering question, not a mathematical one. I have no expertise in this area, but from casual reading, the answer seems to be “no.” Successful applications seem to be rare or non-existent. When probability theory doesn’t work, the other leading brands don’t work either. They just add complexity.

So in a practical sense, I think Cox was probably right. As far as we know, there’s nothing similar to probability theory that’s also useful in practice.7

Using probability in the real world

Probability theory is just math; but we care about it because it’s useful when applied to real-world problems. Originally, for example, it was developed to analyze gambling games.

Suppose you roll a die, and you believe it is fair. Then you believe that the probability it will come up as a three is 1/6. You could write this as P(3) = 1/6.

People write things like that all the time, and it is totally legitimate. It might make you slightly uneasy, however. 3 is a number. It’s abstract. Do numbers have probabilities? Not as such. You assign 3 a probability, in this particular context. In a different context—for example, rolling an icosahedral die—it would have a different probability.

There is always a process of intelligent interpretation between a mathematical statement and the real world. This interpretation gives mathematics “aboutness.” What, in the real world, do the mathematical entities refer to? Here, you understand that “3” corresponds to whether a die has come up three or not.

This interpretation is not merely mental; it is a bodily process of action and perception. You have learned to roll a die in a way that makes its outcome sufficiently random8; and you can count the number of pips on a die face.9 The usefulness of any mathematics depends on such interpretive processes working reliably.

“3” is ambiguous, as we saw. In this simple case, you know what it refers to, and won’t get confused. But someone else might read your observation that “P(3) = 1/6” and try to apply it to an icosahedral die; in which case they might make bad bets. So when communicating with others, or in more complicated cases where you might lose track yourself, you would want to be more explicit.

What exactly did “P(3) = 1/6” mean? Maybe it’s “this particular die, now rolling, has probability 1/6 of coming up with a three.” Or maybe you have a more general belief: “any fair six-sided die has probability 1/6 of coming up three any time it is rolled.” So then, to avoid ambiguity, you could write:

P(any fair six-sided die coming up three any time it is rolled) = 1/6

This has a high ratio of English to math, however. English is notoriously ambiguous. Quite possibly there’s still room for misinterpretation. It might be better to write this in a way that is purely mathematical, so there’s no ambiguity left.

Modern mathematical logic was developed as a way to do exactly that. Logicians wanted a systematic way of turning English statements into unambiguous mathematical ones. The system they invented is called predicate calculus.

It is now the meta-language of mathematics. All math can (in principle) be expressed in predicate calculus. It is immensely more powerful than propositional calculus. Its key trick—which is necessary to express generalizations like “any six-sided die”—is called logical quantification.

But before we get to that, let’s look at a simpler system, Aristotelian logic; and look at how probability theory can more-or-less handle Aristotelian generalization.

Implicit generalizations

Aristotelian logic allows us to make general statements about the properties of particular, single objects. The standard example is “all men are mortal.” The Aristotelian syllogism allows us to reason from general to specific statements. For example, if we know that Socrates is a specific man, then we can conclude that Socrates is mortal.

How does this relate to probability theory? “All men are mortal” is usually considered certain, so it’s not a good example for answering that.

Instead: the logician C. L. Dodgson demonstrated that some snarks—not all—are boojums. A probabilist may write this generalization as a conditional probability:

P(boojum|snark) = 0.4

The vertical bar | is read “given”. The statement is understood as something like “if you see a snark, the probability that it is a boojum is 0.4.” Or, “the probability of boojumness given snarkness is 0.4.”

Mathematicians would call this “an abuse of notation”; but if it is interpreted intelligently in context, it’s unproblematic. Still, it’s rather queer. What exactly are “snark” and “boojum” supposed to mean here?

A probability textbook will tell you that the things that get probabilities are events or hypotheses or outcomes or propositions. (Different authors disagree.) We could legitimately say

P(Edward is a boojum|Edward is a snark) = 0.4

because “Edward is a snark” is a proposition. But this is a specific fact, and we want to express a generalization about snarks broadly.

“Snark” and “boojum” refer to categories, or properties; and those don’t get probabilities. In this context, they are meant to be read as something like “this thing is a snark” (or boojum). A more pedantically correct statement would be:

P(it is a boojum|something is a snark) = 0.4

But again this doesn’t look like math; and what does “this” mean?10 How are we sure that the “something” that is a snark refers to the same thing as the “it” that might be a boojum? Someone might read this, observe that Carlotta is a snark, and conclude that there’s a 0.4 probability that Edward is a boojum. That is not a deduction the equation was supposed to allow. We’re depending on intelligent interpretation. We’ll see that this could become arbitrarily difficult, and therefore unreliable, in more complex cases.

Formally, a Bayesian network is a set of specific conditional probabilities. In practice, by abuse of notation and intelligent application, it is used to express a set of generalizations. For example:

P(snark|hairy) = 0.01

P(boojum|snark) = 0.4

P(lethal|boojum) = 0.9

Implicitly, “hairy,” “snark,” “boojum,” and “lethal” are all meant to refer to the same creature—whichever that happens to be in the situation at hand.

So long as this implicit reference works out, probability theory can in practice capture Aristotelian logic: generalizations about properties of a single object.11 Mathematical formulations of probability theory don’t support that, but there’s usually no practical problem.

However, Aristotelian logic is weak; it doesn’t let you talk about relationships among objects. Let’s shine some light on an example.

There’s other scary monsters out there. Grues, for example. If you explore a cave in the dark, you are likely to be eaten by one.

P(grue|cave) = 0.7

P(grue|dark) = 0.8

P(eaten|grue) = 0.9

This example is different. “Cave” does not refer to the same thing as “grue”! Again, with intelligent interpretation, this may not be a problem. The statements were intended to mean something like:

P(there is some grue nearby|I am in cave) = 0.7

P(there is some grue nearby|the cave is dark) = 0.8

P(that nearby grue will eat me|there is a grue nearby) = 0.9

English is carrying too much of the load here, however. It’s someone’s job to keep track of grues and caves and “I”s and make sure they are all in the right relationships. The conditional probability formalism is not able to do that.12

Logical quantification

Predicate calculus has an elegant, general way of talking about relationships: logical quantifiers. They are the solution here.

A simplest use cleans up the vagueness of “P(boojum|snark) = 0.4.” We’re supposed to interpret that as: anything that is a snark has probability 0.4 of being a boojum. In predicate calculus,

∀x: P(boojum(x)|snark(x)) = 0.4

“∀” is read “for all,” and the thing that comes after it is a place holder variable that could stand for anything. So this means “for anything at all—call it x—the probability that x is a boojum, given that x is snark, is 0.4.”

So ∀ is doing two pieces of work for us. One is that it lets us make an explicitly general statement. “P(boojum|snark) = 0.4” was implicitly meant to apply to all monsters, but that worked only “by abuse of notation”; you can’t actually do that in formal probability theory.

∀’s second trick is to allow us to reason from generalities to specifics—the Aristotelian syllogism. This is done by “binding” the variable x to a particular value, such as Edward. From

∀x: P(boojum(x)|snark(x)) = 0.4

we are allowed to logically deduce

P(boojum(Edward)|snark(Edward)) = 0.4

(This operation is called “instantiation” of the general statement.)

There are two logical quantifiers, ∀ and ∃. The second one gets read “there exists.” For example,

∃x: father(x, Edward)

“There exists some x such that x is Edward’s father”—or, more naturally, “Something is Edward’s father,” or “Edward has a father.”

The power of predicate calculus comes when we combine two or more quantifiers in a single statement, one nested inside another.13 Because each quantifier has its own variable, we can use them to relate two or more things.

Fatherhood is a relationship. Every vertebrate has a father.14

∀x: vertebrate(x) → (∃y: father(y, x))

From this, if we also know that Edward is a vertebrate, we can deduce that he has a father.15

Probably, every vertebrate has exactly one father:

∀x: vertebrate(x) → (∃y: father(y, x) ∧ (∀z: father(z, x) → z=y))

“If x is a vertebrate, then it has some father (y), and if anything (z) is x’s father, it’s actually just y.”

Do you believe that? I was sure of it until I thought a bit. If two sperm fertilize an egg at almost the same instant, maybe it’s possible (if very unlikely) that during the first mitosis, the excess paternal chromosomes will get randomly dumped, leaving daughter cells with a normal karyotype composed of a mixture of chromosomes from the two fathers. For all I know, this does happen occasionally in fish or something. Or maybe it just can’t happen, because vertebrate eggs have a reliable mechanism to detect a wrong karyotype, and abort.16

We’d like to bring evidence to bear—evidence that (like all real-world evidence) cannot be certain. Suppose we sequence DNA from some monsters and find that it sure looks like Arthur and Harold are both fathers of Edward:

P(father(Arthur, Edward) | experiment) = 0.99

P(father(Harold, Edward) | experiment) = 0.99

P(Arthur = Harold | observations) = 0.01

This should update our belief that every vertebrate has only one father. How?

Here we would be reasoning from specifics to generalities (whereas the implicit instantiation trick of Bayesian networks allows us to reason from generalities to specifics). This is outside the scope of probability theory.

Statistical inference is based on probability theory, and enables reasoning from specifics to generalities in some cases. It is not just probability theory, though; and it handles only simple, restricted cases; and it doesn’t relate to predicate calculus in any straightforward way.

Back to the cave:

∀x: ∀y: P(∃z: grue(z) ∧ near(z,x) | person(x) ∧ cave(y) ∧ in(x, y)) = 0.8

“If a person (x) is in a cave (y), then the probability that there’s a grue (z) near the person is 0.8.” Most of what is going on this statement is predicate logic, not probability. Remember that for probability theory, propositions are opaque and atomic. As far as it is concerned, “person(x) ∧ cave(y) ∧ in(x, y)” is just a long name for an event that is either observed or not; and so likewise “∃z: grue(z) ∧ near(z,x).” It can’t “look inside” to see that we’re talking about three different things and their relationships.

In practice, probability theory is often combined with other mathematical methods (such as predicate logic in this case). Probabilists mostly don’t even notice they are doing this. When they use logic, they do so informally and intuitively.

The danger is that they imagine probability theory is doing the work, when in fact something else is doing the heavy lifting. This can lead to logical errors. That is common in scientific practice: the probabilistic part of the reasoning is carried out correctly, but it is “misapplied.” In routine science, “probabilistic reasoning” is usually “we ran this statistics program.” “Misapplied” means that the program was run correctly, but due to a logical error, the results don’t imply what the users thought.

Another danger is sometimes-dramatic over-estimation of what probability theory is capable of. The mistaken idea that “probability theory generalizes logic”17 led to some badly confused work in artificial intelligence, for instance. More importantly, it has also warped some accounts of the philosophy of science.

Probabilistic logic

Probability theory can’t help you reason about relationships, and that is certainly an important part of rationality. So, probability theory is not a complete theory of rationality—one of the main points of this essay.

Predicate calculus can help you reason about relationships; but by itself, it can’t help you reason about evidence. Probability, in the Bayesian interpretation, is a theory of evidence. Can we combine them to get a complete theory of rationality?

“∀x: P(boojum(x)|snark(x)) = 0.4” is a statement of predicate calculus—not probability theory. As written, it is either true or false. But, maybe you aren’t sure which! In that case, you may have a probability estimate for it. And you might want to update your probability estimate given evidence.

P(∀x: P(boojum(x)|snark(x)) = 0.4 | snark(Edward)∧boojum(Edward)) = 0.8

“Given the observations that Edward is both a snark and a boojum, I now think it’s 0.8 probable that the statement ‘the probability that any snark is a boojum is 0.4’ is true.”

What exactly would that mean? How would you use it? What would that say about the probability of a particular snark being a boojum? What happens in the 0.2 probability that the statement is not true? In that case, what does it say about the probability of a particular snark being a boojum? Suppose the probability is actually 0.400001, not 0.4? Does that make the statement false?

The formula freely mixes probability theory with predicate calculus, nesting them any-which-way. There’s a P inside the scope of a ∀ inside the scope of a P. How does that work?

It turns out that, in general, no one yet has an answer to this. The field of probabilistic logic concerns the question. So far, various restricted probabilistic logics have been studied, which do not allow freely mixing probabilities and logical quantifiers. Even these restricted versions can get extremely complicated, and a general theory is currently out of reach.18

Formal systems, rationality, and epistemology

Even if we could fully integrate probability theory and predicate calculus, together they would be far from a complete theory of rationality. They have no account of what the various bits of notation mean, and where they come from. What is “father,” and how did you come up with the idea that ∀x: vertebrate(x) → (∃y: father(y, x)) even might be true?

Logical positivism was the dream that by writing things out precisely enough, in enough detail, we could get answers to such questions. It conclusively failed. The problem is that formalism necessarily depends on intelligent interpretation-in-action to connect it with the real world; to give it “aboutness.”19

Formal systems (such as logic and probability theory) are also only useful once you have a model. Where do those come from? I think it’s important to go about finding models in a rational way—but formal rationality has nothing to offer. (I wrote about this in “How to think real good.”)

As a further point, a complete theory of rationality—if such a thing were possible—would probably not be a complete theory of epistemology. We have very little idea what a good epistemological theory might look like, but my guess is that rationality (even in the broadest sense) would be only a small part.

Since we don’t know how people know things (the subject of epistemology), we should try to find out—empirically, and rationally! Armchair speculation has been seriously misleading. (Basing epistemology on an over-simplified fairy-tale version of Newton’s discovery of gravitation—a popular starting point—is not an empirical or rational approach, and reliably fails.) We need to actually observe people using knowledge, finding knowledge, creating knowledge. Only after much observation could we develop and test hypotheses.

In the 1980s, the “social studies of science” research program began to do this. Unfortunately, much of that was postmodern nonsense. It was marred by metaphysical and political axes that many of its practitioners wanted to grind, plus lack of understanding of the subject matter in most cases. This led to the “Science Wars” of the 1990s, culminating in the Sokal hoax, which pretty nearly killed off the field.

But this program did some valuable observational work, and made some interesting preliminary hypotheses. I’d like to see a return to careful observational study of how science (and other knowledge-generating activities) are done—this time without the ideological baggage.

Here’s one valuable generalization that came out of “social studies of science.” As I pointed out earlier, mathematical formulae are only given “aboutness” by people’s skilled, interpretive application in practical activity. The same is true of knowledge in general!

Further, most human activity is collaborative. It turns out that sometimes what I know cannot be separated from other people’s ability to make sense of it in relationship with particular situations. Making sense of knowing requires an account of the division of epistemic labor. Knowledge is often not a property of isolated individuals.20

Taking these points seriously leads to radical revisions not only in the sorts of explanations that could plausibly be part of an adequate epistemology, but also in the sorts of things it would need to explain.

Historical appendix: Where did the confusion come from?

E. T. Jaynes’ Probability Theory: The Logic of Science appears to be the root source. He was completely confused about the relationship between probability theory and logic.21 There’s strong evidence that when people tried to de-confuse him, he pig-headedly refused to listen.

He wrote that probability theory forms the “uniquely valid principles of logic in general” (p. xx); and:

Our theme is simply: Probability Theory as Extended Logic. The new perception amounts to the recognition that the mathematical rules of probability theory are not merely rules for calculating frequencies of “random variables”; they are also the unique consistent rules for conducting inference (i.e. plausible reasoning) of any kind. (p. xxii)

This is simply false, as I’ve explained in this essay. How did he go wrong?

He got confused by the word “Aristotelian”—or more exactly by the word “non-Aristotelian.”

Aristotelian logic has two truth values, namely “true” and “false.” In the 1930s, there was a vogue for “non-Aristotelian logic,” which added other truth values. For example, a statement could be “meaningless” rather than either true or false. Non-Aristotelian logic turned out to be a dead end, and is a mostly-forgotten historical curiosity.

Predicate calculus is not Aristotelian logic, but it is not “non-Aristotelian”, either! It has only two truth values.

What’s confusing is that Aristotelian logic was extended in two different dimensions: by adding truth values (to produce non-Aristotelian logic) and by allowing nested quantifiers (to produce predicate calculus).

When someone tried to explain to Jaynes that probability theory only extends Aristotelian logic, not predicate calculus, he remembered the phrase “non-Aristotelian logic” and read about that, and (rightly) concluded it was irrelevant to his project. Then when the someone said “no, you missed the point, what matters is predicate calculus,” Jaynes just dug in his heels and refused to take that seriously.

There are several places in his book where he says this explicitly. There’s a long discussion in the section titled “Nitpicking” (p. 23). It’s an amazing expression of defiantly obstinate confusion. Well worth examining to learn linguistic signs that you are refusing to see the obvious: out of arrogance, or because you half-realize that accepting it would collapse your grandiose Theory Of Everything.

There’s another refusal on page xxviii:

Although our concern with the nature of logical inference leads us to discuss many of the same issues, our language differs greatly from the stilted jargon of logicians and philosophers. There are no linguistic tricks and there is no “meta-language” gobbledygook; only plain English. … No further clarity would be achieved … with ‘What do you mean by “exists”?’

Predicate calculus is the standard “meta-language” for mathematics, and getting clear about what “exists” means was Frege’s central insight that made that possible.22

Jaynes is just saying “I don’t understand this, so it must all be nonsense.”

A Socratic dialog

Pop Bayesian (PB): Wow, I have a faster-than-light starship! [A complete theory of rationality.]

Me: That seems extremely unlikely… how does it work?

PB: It’s about five inches long and has pointy bits at one end. Look!

Me: That’s a fork. [That’s a minor generalization of propositional calculus.]

PB: No, it’s totally an FTL starship! [A complete theory of rationality!]

Me: No, it’s not.

PB: Yes it is!

Me: Look, a minimum requirement for an FTL starship is that it go faster than light. [A minimum requirement for a general theory of rationality is that it can do everything predicate calculus and everything probability theory can do.]

PB: Yeah, look! I can make it go way fast! *Throws the fork across the room, really hard.*

Me: Uh… I don’t think you understand how fast light goes [how much more powerful predicate logic is than propositional logic].

PB: I can make it go however fast! I could shoot it out of a gun, even!

Me: Um, you don’t seem to know enough physics to understand the in-principle reason you can’t accelerate ordinary objects to FTL speeds. [If you can mistake probability theory for a general theory of rationality, you must be missing the mathematical background which you’d need in order to understand why it’s a non-starter.]

After writing this, I found a delightful, similar satire of Bayesianism by Cosma Shalizi, "Solvitur ambulando."

  • 1. Predicate calculus is still more computationally expensive; in fact, it is provably arbitrarily expensive. I’m not advocating it as a general engineering approach to rationality either.
  • 2. Or maybe not. Since propositional calculus does not let you talk about anything, its “therefore” really isn’t the same as a common-sense “therefore.” Some people think this is important, but it’s not relevant to this essay, so let’s move on.
  • 3. E. T. Jaynes did not understand this. He was badly confused here already. He failed to understand the relationship between propositional and Aristotelian logic, much less the more complicated relationship between Aristotelian and predicate logic. In Probability Theory: The Logic of Science, p. 4, he claims to explain what a syllogism is, but his explanation is actually of modus ponens! Modus ponens is an operation of propositional logic, whereas the syllogism requires Aristotelian logic, i.e. a single universal quantifier. Jaynes did not see the distinction between the two; a very basic error.
  • 4. If the events are not independent, it’s still possible to calculate probabilities, but more complicated.
  • 5. In fact, Cox pointed this out in his 1961 book The Algebra of Probable Inference, quoting Boole in Footnote 5, p. 101. In this passage, Boole not only makes the connection between the frequentist and logical interpretations of probability, he suggests that it is necessary—which is the point of Cox’s Theorem.
  • 6. In the Bayesian interpretation, anyway.
  • 7. An important exception is quantum mechanics, which can be seen as an extension of probability theory in which probabilities can be negative or complex numbers. (Thanks to John Costello (@joxn) for pointing this out.) It is not “like” probability theory in Cox’s sense, and not useful as a way of reasoning about macroscopic uncertainty, but is of great practical (engineering) and theoretical (physics) importance.
  • 8. This might seem obvious, but small children can’t do it reliably.
  • 9. Or, more accurately, you can subitize them.
  • 10. Technically, “this” is an indexical. Mid–20th-century logicians realized that indexicals allow for implicit universal quantification—when combined with some method for instantiating, or determining the reference of, each indexical. They didn’t have much of a story about the method. One of the central innovations of the Pengi system I built with Phil Agre was using (simulated) machine vision to bind indexicals to real-world objects.
  • 11. Technically, this is not exactly what “Aristotelian logic” means; I’m skipping some fiddly details that are only of historical interest, and not relevant to this discussion.
  • 12. Here “I” and “that” are indexicals, which give implicit quantification, but “some” is an explicit quantifier. An explicit formalization of this situation requires nested quantification, and you can’t get that with just indexicals, even implicitly.
  • 13. An accurate account of nested quantification was the key to modern logic. It was developed by Gottlob Frege. To quote Wikipedia: “In effect, Frege invented axiomatic predicate logic, in large part thanks to his invention of quantified variables, which eventually became ubiquitous in mathematics and logic, and which solved the problem of multiple generality. Previous logic had dealt with the logical constants and, or, not, and some and all, but iterations of these operations, especially ‘some’ and ‘all’, were little understood: even the distinction between a sentence like ‘every boy loves some girl’ and ‘some girl is loved by every boy’ could be represented only very artificially, whereas Frege’s formalism had no difficulty… A frequently noted example is that that Aristotle’s logic is unable to represent mathematical statements like Euclid’s theorem, a fundamental statement of number theory that there are an infinite number of prime numbers. Frege’s ‘conceptual notation’ however can represent such inferences.”
  • 14. Let’s simplify this to natural, biological fatherhood, ignoring issues of legal parenthood and laboratory genetic manipulation.
  • 15. Formally, we bind x to Edward and instantiate to get vertebrate(Edward) → (∃y: father(y, Edward)), and then apply modus ponens (implication elimination) to get ∃y: father(y, Edward).
  • 16. A few months after writing this, I learned about Tremblay’s salamander, an all-female species with no fathers. They are triploid, and reproduce only by self-fertilization. I read about Tremblay’s salamander in Randall Monroe’s What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions which is full of fascinating factoids of this sort.
  • 17. It’s worth noting that whereas most of what you can do with logic, you can’t do with probability theory, everything you can do with probability theory, you can do with predicate calculus. You can easily axiomatize probability theory, and thereby embed the whole thing in predicate calculus.
  • 18. I find this somewhat surprising, actually, and have been tempted to dive in and see if I can solve the problem. But, looking at some examples of reasoning about probabilities of probabilities helps one see, quite quickly, why this is hard. It’s difficult to know what they mean. Interestingly, Jaynes worked on this, developing a formalism he called Ap, which I’ve discussed elsewhere. Ap handles only the very simplest cases (and is probably unworkable in practice for even those), but it does give some insight.
  • 19. Wittgenstein, who was partly responsible for logical positivism in the first place, diagnosed this failure clearly in his Philosophical Investigations. Heidegger presented much the same insight earlier in Being and Time, although not as clearly, and not with reference to logical positivism specifically.
  • 20. This means that the representational theory of mind, which descends from logical positivism, is unworkable. See “A billion tiny spooks.”
  • 21. He was heavily influenced by Cox’s work, which he entirely misunderstood. Cox was definitely not confused, and not to blame; he was explicit that he was discussing only the propositional calculus. Cox’s writing is delightfully informal; if you already know logic, his book is enormously entertaining. If you don’t know logic, the informality is liable to mislead you.
  • 22. Part of the obstacle to understanding nested quantifiers had been Aristotle’s misunderstanding of the existential quantifier even by itself. If you want to geek out about the history of logic, you can read about this in “The Square of Opposition.”

Utilitiarianism is an eternalism

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

Utilitarianism is an ethical theory based on the intuition that one should act to produce the most good for everyone overall. That intuition is often right. Trying to make it the sole source of ethics always fails, though. This is an example of a non-theistic, rationalist eternalist error.

Utilitarianism is an accountant’s theory of morality. (It appeals especially to atheists of a technical bent.) Suppose you have to choose between two actions. If you could predict all the results of each action, and if you could figure out how good (or bad) the results would be for everyone, and if you could combine all the goods and bads into a single total number, then you could compare the totals for each action, and choose the better one. (This is an example of the continuum gambit.)

Notice the “ifs” in this story. To make utilitarianism work, you’d have to be able to:

  • predict all the effects of actions
  • assign a numerical goodness/badness of each effect on each person
  • combine these numbers into a meaningful total

Each of these tasks is quite impossible.

Utilitarianism is, therefore, a wrong-way reduction: it replaces the difficult but tractable problem of ethical decision-making with an absolutely hopeless one. This is just like the sportsball problem I discussed earlier. It is far easier to predict the winning team in a sportsball game than to predict how many goals will be made by each side.

The Other Leading Brands of ethical theory—deontology and virtue ethics—don’t require you to solve such problems. Deontology merely requires that you follow rules, and virtue ethics that you be a moral sort of person. These approaches have other dire defects, and are quite wrong. But they don’t require impossible feats of computation.

Utilitarians are undeterred. When pressed, they usually admit the impossibilities. Further, they admit that no known version of utilitarianism gives correct ethical answers even in principle, even if you could solve all the impossible problems.

The seemingly-simple ethical accounting turns turns fiendishly complicated once you dive into the details. Every accounting scheme produces clearly wrong results in some cases. Utilitiarians propose ever-more-complex approaches, each of which turns out to have its own pathologies. This obviates utilitarianism’s most attractive feature: its intuitive simplicity, at first glance, compared with the endless rules of deontology and the elaborately literary conceptions of virtue.

When challenged, utilitarians usually argue that, on balance, their theory is less bad than deontology or virtue ethics—which they regard as the only two possible alternatives. (The fact that all three are clearly wrong does not seem to motivate a search for other possibilities.)

Utilitiarians suggest that, even if it is impossible to calculate the overall goodness of actions, doing so even approximately is correct approach to ethics. They feel that there must be a version of their theory that actually works, and that all-purpose methods of approximating must exist—even though they are presently unknown. This is a nice example of eternalistic wistful certainty.

Eternalism is the denial of nebulosity: the fact that meaningness is inherently indefinite, uncertain, and untidy. Utilitarianism proposes a fixed, objective, sharp-edged theory of ethics—which I believe is entirely impossible.

The nebulosity of ethics is uncomfortable. It means we can have no guarantee of acting ethically, no matter how hard we try. It means ethics is really hard.

Utilitarianism promised, at first glance, that ethics is easy, just a matter of adding some numbers. Looked at in detail, it makes ethics impossible, not merely really hard.

Eternalism is always a con; it always makes huge, infinitely desirable promises it can’t fulfill.

Later in the book, we’ll look at the ways ethical eternalism’s failure produces ghastly, unethical outcomes.

Perfection Salad

Perfection Salad

This is about the harm done by ideologically-distorted concepts of rationality. I wrote it in 1988. My main example came from nutrition. However, the actual subject, by satirical analogy, was cognitive “science,” which I discussed only briefly at the end. Cognitive science was doubly distorted by rationality: it pretended to be rational itself, and also modeled people as rational in ways they aren’t.

I find little to disagree with now, so I’m republishing the text here unaltered. However, I’m following it up with newly-written pages discussing the subsequent evolution of cognitive “science” into neuro-“science,” which inherited some defects; and the growing public realization that nutrition “science” has failed catastrophically.

Introduction

This is an essay about scientism:1 the special social power given to people and discourses that cast themselves as “scientific.” It examines a particular case, “domestic science,” which is now plainly bogus. Thereby it tries to illuminate, and to cast as bogus, other cases (such as “cognitive science”) currently accepted as legitimate.

My theoretical framework here relies heavily on Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality. This book is better titled in the French edition: The Will to Knowledge. It takes sex as a concrete example, but is actually concerned with the relationship between knowledge and power.

My concrete example is drawn from Laura Shapiro’s Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century. Shapiro’s book is a history of the “domestic science” movement. Domestic science was founded in the late nineteenth century as, simultaneously, an intellectual discipline and a reform movement, both directed at the improvement of cooking. In its later manifestation as “home economics,” it had an overwhelming effect on women’s lives that has abated only partly in the last twenty years.2

Domestic science provides a neat illustration for the pathologies of intellectualized rationality, authoritative knowledge, and transcendence. Here at the end of the twentieth century, it seems mostly absurd to think that science has anything much to say about cooking,3 and we thus have a degree of distance on a particular manifestation of a group of connected twistednesses that still dominate the way we think about most things.

Authoritative Recipes

Domestic science, like everything that calls itself a “science”, presented itself as a field of intellectual endeavor. Intellectual fields are supposed ideally to be “detached.” However, the domestic scientists primarily pursued a practical project: reforming the way Americans cooked. To this end, they amassed vast power, as was inevitably necessary to radically change the lives of tens of millions of people. They pursued a particular route to this power, one which has become extremely important in contemporary society: the validation of discourse.

We are accustomed to thinking of power inhering in institutions and political roles. In fact, as Foucault first pointed out, most power in the modern world lies in discourse: in the control of knowledge. However, these sorts of power are synergistic, and the domestic scientists were able to accumulate considerable institutional power:

Then they quickly assembled all the appurtenances necessary to a full-fledged profession: syllabi for course work at every level, degree-granting programs of study, a professional organization, a journal, and annual meetings. … they could now join forces with institutions that might help them solidify their position. Home economics easily won a place in industry, education, and government… and the arrangement satisfied everyone concerned. (pp. 7–8)4

This institutional power, however, was useful not so much because it gave domestic scientists the ability to directly control other people’s actions, but because it validated and gave authority to their discourse.

Knowledge is power only when it is accepted as authoritative. A discourse is validated as authoritative when it is established that any of a class of questions is to be answered in terms of that discourse. In this case, domestic science established itself as the discourse in terms of which any serious question about food would have to be answered. The process of establishing institutional validation for a body of discourse is a crucial part of assembling power-through-control-of-knowledge. We can see it happening all around us now; it is clearly visible, for example, in the extraordinary political success of connectionism, whose modus operandi is neatly described by the paragraph quoted above.

Once a group has established their knowledge as authoritative, anyone who has direct power is forced to consult them, if only as an ass-covering maneuver.

Domestic scientists were being sought not only as teachers but as experts, and in the field of institutional feeding their participation became especially prominent. Many were invited to examine the diets of hospital patients, prisoners, asylum inmates, college students, and other groups subjected to quantity cooking on a small budget, and to make recommendations for improving the nutritional quality of food at the lowest cost. After their disillusioning experience with the mass of poor and working people [who insisted on eating food that tasted good], Mrs. Richards and her colleagues welcomed the opportunity to work with these more captive populations. (p. 161)

Much of the rest of my essay is concerned with just how the validation of domestic science was achieved. What about a body of discourse makes it easy to render authoritative? In our culture, the best strategy is to cast the discourse as a “Science.” This strategy has been followed, with varying degrees of success, by Domestic Science, Library Science, Astrological Science, Materials Science, Agricultural Science, Political Science, Sanitation Science, Dental Science, Management Science, and Cognitive Science. The strategy involves smearing a particular sort of rhetoric over the subject matter and the performance of a variety of meaningless but culturally valorized rituals involving the invocation of such deities as “precision” and “repeatability,” scientific-looking tools, and the use of numbers whenever possible. The goal is to make the actual practices of the group resemble those of physicists as nearly as possible.

Scientific Food

At the time domestic science was at its height only two things were actually known about food: that different foods had different energy densities (measurable in calories per ounce) and that food was made up of varying proportions of protein, carbohydrate, and fat. Nothing more would be learned until the discovery of the vitamins two decades later. This did not stop domestic scientists from proposing that every housewife be taught considerable amounts of any science that seemed potentially relevant, including, for example, psychology, physiology, bacteriology, and chemistry (p. 65).

If the housekeeper could be made to think of herself as a scientist, calmly at work over the beakers and burners in her laboratory, then every meal would emerge as she planned, pristine and invariable. (p. 86)

Science genuinely relevant to food had yet to be invented. So domestic scientists applied irrelevant science, and prescribed scientific-seeming rituals to be adhered to when cooking. For instance, a science is supposed to involve experiments, and demands that these experiments be repeatable. The rhetoric of domestic science equates cooking with laboratory experimentation:

…an enthusiastic social reformer in the domestic-science movement complained … that “even the intelligent housekeeper still talks about ‘luck with her sponge cake.’ Luck! There is no such word in science, and to make sponge cake is a scientific process!” (p. 86)

One of the hallmarks of science is measuring things.

Exact measurement was the foundation for everything else that happened in the scientific kitchen, although there was not always agreement about how to reach exactitude. (p. 115)

Domestic science invented standardized measures for food in the 1880s. The cup was standardized as a half-pint at this point, for instance.

[Fannie] Farmer’s interest in exact measurements went far beyond cups and spoons, however: she liked to specify that strips of pimento used for decoration be cut three-quarters of an inch long and half an inch wide, and she could measure out spices by the grain. (p. 116)

Other things that could be measured were all the basic chemical properties of food. Energy density is still considered relevant, but very few of the others are; except in a few extreme cases, the pH of foods is irrelevant. However,

“Chemical analysis should be the guide for the cookery book,” she urged, and looked forward gladly to the day when a laboratory microscope would be standard equipment in every kitchen. (p. 130)

Some domestic scientists advocated that every kitchen include complete equipment for quantitative chemical analysis.

Science is big on charts and graphs, and domestic scientists rose to the challenge. Shapiro shows, for instance, a “Cupcake chart” with a huge matrix of numerical entries, and describes a “meal chart” in which

…protein, carbohydrate, and fat were distributed with an exactitude that demanded kitchen scales, a ruler, and some arithmetic. Atop two rolls, for example (combined weight, two ounces; cost, two cents; percent protein .170; calories, 163), the man was permitted to spread a one-inch cube of butter (weight, one ounce; cost, two and a quarter cents; percent protein, none; calories, 224)… What eluded her scrutiny, however, was the nature of the food itself. To balance a meal by numbers alone, ignoring taste and texture, meant that creamed potatoes, creamed vegetable soup, macaroni with cream sauce, salad with creamy dressing, and gelatin with cream were all listed on the menu for Day Two, along with stewed prunes, stewed corn, and stewed tomatoes. (p. 209)

Perhaps the ultimate manifestation of this was the “Dietary Computer” (no kidding) invented by Ellen Swallow Richards, who was the first woman graduate of and first woman instructor at (of course!) MIT.5

Ellen Swallow Richards
Ellen Swallow Richards

Meal plans were justified in terms of the process of digestion, or rather the process as it was understood.

The meal began with a clear soup, which Mrs. Rorer planned specifically for its lack of nutritive properties. The stomach was supposed to simply rest on the soup, gathering strength, as she explained it, “before the heavy work of digesting a spare rib.” Applesauce accompanied the spare rib, the acid countering the fat, according to rule… (p. 80)

…the chewing required by salted almonds would increase the circulation of blood. In this way a good supply of blood would be furnished to the stomach… (p. 81)

What I find most interesting in all this is that the domestic scientists knew that their understanding of nutrition was very incomplete, but they did not hesitate to make prescriptions for action based on them that determined the way Americans ate for more than half a century. What little genuine understanding they had did not support these prescriptions. For instance, they could measure energy density. By itself, though, energy density tells you nothing about how to cook. So they made the arbitrary assumption that more was better, and used as much sugar and fat as possible (p. 76). To this assumption can probably be credited tens of millions of deaths from heart disease.

Many of the variables on which the domestic scientists’ prescriptions were based, such as pH, seem now to us to be irrelevant, and others that we consider central couldn’t be measured and so did not enter into the prescriptions. Since vitamins had not been discovered, domestic scientists were not big on fruits or vegetables, which didn’t have much protein, carbohydrate, or fat in them, and mostly seemed to be water.

Domestic scientists assumed that the ratios of protein, carbohydrate, and fat were relevant variables, and based diet plans on theories of the “correct” ratios. “Nutrition scientists” are still doing this, and so far as I can tell they still don’t know what the “correct” ratios are, because every five years they confidently declare that they have discovered with complete certainty that we should have twenty-three percent or thirty-seven percent or seventeen percent protein in our diets, and American eating habits obediently shift accordingly. Most likely there are no “correct” ratios, because lots of other variables are involved.

Rational Cookery

The cult of science is part of the cult of rationality. By “rationality” here I mean rationality as an intellectualized prescriptive ideal. Ultimately, it is by presenting a discourse as rational that it is validated. Presenting it as scientific is one means to this end. Rationality requires other rhetoric and ritual practices, not strictly scientific, which we can see in operation in domestic science.

Rationality mandates control.

…color-coordinated meals… represented most of all the achievement of an extraordinary degree of control over the messy, unpredictable business of the kitchen. (p. 84)

Rationality demands that practice accord to formal rules.

Rather than learning to consult their instincts, their sense of taste, or their imaginations, fledgling cooks were taught to depend on rules, which existed on a lofty plane far above the pleasures of appetite. (p. 90)

Rationality prescribes certainty.

The extraordinary degree of predictability that was the triumph of mass-produced food had been sought for years by laboratory-based scientific cooks, and its achievement represented the fulfillment of one of the major goals of domestic science: the attainment of certainty. An ever-sturdier sense of finitude, objectivity, and perfect control could now be discerned in recipes and meal plans… (p. 206)

Rationality requires “objectivity,” or distance from the subject matter. The ideal was a “carefully maintained impersonality between the cook and the food” (p. 211). This is accomplished, in part, by abstract representation.

Sometimes, in fact, it was possible for a cooking teacher to strip away so much of what she considered extraneous to the process of cookery that the remainder could be reduced to a chart, itself a stunning acknowledgement of the now frozen distance that separated the cook from the food. (p. 206)

Rationality promotes generalizations, even when these do great violence to the phenomena.

Studying the diets of black tenant farmers in Alabama, then, the investigators noted that women and children often worked in the fields alongside the men, but since there was no way according to the method to take that work into consideration, or to assign nutritional needs to it, they decided for convenience sake to assume that it didn’t exist. (p. 167)

One participant at the fourth Lake Placid conference had taken an informal poll of twenty-two families to find out what they ate, and the results distressed her. Although there was a great deal of repetition in the daily menus within each household, she told her colleagues, the variety from house to house was dizzying. Evidently “local tastes and family idiosyncrasies” still exerted a powerful influence over the dinner table, preventing the development of “conscious standards” in meal planning. … “It is true that all people do not demand the same kind of food. This is due sometimes to acquired appetites, sometimes due to finicalities of appetite due to bad living and sometimes to the fact that people have not enough other interests besides that in eating and drinking.” When people advance to the stage of what she called “rational living” … they would find that “unreasonable preferences for particular foods” disappeared. (pp. 213–214)

Observing the meticulous rituals of rationality is the high road to status in our culture.

… these [completely bogus] dietary investigations helped boost domestic scientists to a new height of self-respect. The clean and precise task of gathering information for scientific analysis could not possibly be confused with cooking, much less eating, and the institutional backing of the federal government gave the work an orderliness and a magnitude that surpassed their most ambitious reveries. To have acknowledged individual quirks like pregnancy or child labor would only have interrupted the smooth operation of the intellectual machinery, and dragged down the whole process into a slough of those idiosyncratic emotional responses traditionally called female. (p. 167)

Rationality worship is central to many, perhaps most, of the twistednesses of our culture. I should like to say a lot more about this here, but the topic is too large. I think you can imagine that if we analyzed most other parts of contemporary culture we would find them shot through with the same disease we find here in cooking. I would very much like to study the way in which rationality worship, a form of institutionalized insanity, gives rise to both individual and group twistedness.

Transcending Physicality

No matter how modern, civilized, rational, and scientific we are, some activities remind us that we have somehow failed to escape being animals; bodies; physical objects. Eating is one. Thus, we eat in ritualized ways that try to deny, as much as possible, that it is a necessary bodily process. The bestiality of eating is enhanced by the fact that what we eat is other living things. I occasionally suddenly realize that the thing I am putting in my mouth is a part cut out of the sexual organ of a plant which sat around outdoors, rested on earth, got rained on, had bugs wander over it, and pumped sap around inside itself, and am momentarily horrified and disgusted. One of the great goals, and eventually triumphant successes, of domestic science was to disguise the bodily nature of food.

Most authorities recommended one to three hours’ boiling for string beans, forty-five minutes for asparagus, twenty minutes for cucumbers, half an hour for celery, and up to twelve hours for beets. … Salad greens, which did have to be served raw and crisp, demanded more complicated measures. The object of scientific salad making was to subdue the raw greens until they bore as little resemblance as possible to their natural state. … One cook recommended cutting lettuce leaves into “ribbons of uniform width” for a more orderly arrangement, and the most popular version of a spinach salad required the spinach to be boiled, drained, chopped, molded into little cups, unmolded, and decorated with a neat slice of hardboiled egg. (p. 96)

The physicality of food makes it disagreeable not only to eat but also to cook.

Handling food, she emphasized in a letter in a letter to Atkinson, was “distasteful to women” … [meat in particular] cannot be handled without disgust. (p. 151)

Various devices were invented to avoid the necessity of actually touching food while cooking it: the chafing dish, mechanical bread kneaders, and a device known as the Aladdin Oven, for example.

Food, ideally, ought to be stripped of concrete properties; those properties it retains should be as pure and abstract as possible. This ideal was triumphantly realized in the development of products like Cheez-Whiz and Jell-O, which have no texture, pure primary colors, and no identifiable source in the natural world. Kool-Whip additionally has an elemental flavor, being simply sweet. Crisco, then, is the ultimate food product, having no texture, color, or flavor; a food so abstract it is easy to forget that it is coarsely physical, and to imagine that it resides rather in the realm of Platonic forms, side by side with cylindric algebras and cohomology groups.

This attempt to deny physicality is a central theme in our culture, one closely connected with that of rationality.

Domestic Science is to Food as Cognitive Science is to People

It seems now to us ludicrous that science should have much to say about cooking, yet this was accepted without question in our parents’ generation. It is now accepted without question that science has a great deal to say about “cognition.” And our views of what sort of things we are, and a great many institutional policies, are shaped by what “cognitive scientists” say about us. Cognitive science is twisted by rationality worship twice: as with other sciences, it twists its own methods to conform to rationality’s dictates, but it also reads rationality into its own subject matter, casting people as rational.

To make my analogy explicit, cognitive scientists, like domestic ones, are wont to apply irrelevant branches of science, smear empty mathematics over the phenomena, make absurd generalizations from variables they can measure while neglecting anything they can’t, adopt outward trappings of physicists even when they are inappropriate, constantly engage in meaningless “scientific” rituals, and make confident policy recommendations (e.g. concerning education) based on what they know to be extremely incomplete understandings. As rational beings, they both seek for themselves and impute to their subject matter control, practice according to formal rules, certain knowledge, objectivity, abstract representation, and generalization.

Seeing the absurdity of these practices in domestic science should make cognitive science also look absurd. I think it likely that “cognitive science” will seem as much of an anachronistic oxymoron in thirty years time as “domestic science” does now.

Just as cooking is slowly recovering from domestic science, our understanding of ourselves will slowly recover after cognitive science is discredited.

Epilogue, 2014

It has been more than a quarter century since I wrote that. What progress have we made? Has food recovered from domestic science? Has our understanding of ourselves recovered from cognitive science? I’ll address those questions in the following pages.

Oh, and if you were wondering about the title, “Perfection Salad” is a bizarre “scientific” dish that would now be unrecognizable as food, but was popular as late as the 1960s. There’s a picture and recipe here.

  • 1. Nowadays people argue about how “scientism” should be defined, in order to promote their particular ideologies of what counts as rational, and therefore what bodies of knowledge should be granted authoritative social power. That wasn’t true in 1988, or anyway I was unaware of it. In 2014, I'm not interested in arguing about what scientism “really means” or should mean; the covert power-grab in that kind of argument is partly what this essay is about!
  • 2. I.e. starting around 1968, twenty years before I wrote this.
  • 3. Alas, a quarter-century later, “science” is still claiming authority over food, with results that have probably been catastrophic. I discuss that in the follow-up.
  • 4. All page numbers are from the first (1986) edition. I haven’t read the second (2008) one.
  • 5. Despite my poking fun at her here, she had an impressive career and seems to have been overall a Good Thing.

Nutrition offers its resignation. And the reply

USDA ChooseMyPlate icon

Dear human species,

Today we, the professionals of nutrition, offer you our resignation. This letter—signed by virtually every nutrition scientist and technician, clinical nutritionist, dietician, and food journalist, worldwide—is our heartfelt apology.

We screwed up. We failed completely.

We may have killed millions of people. We’re really, really sorry about that. However:

Our most important message to you today is: we know absolutely nothing about nutrition. Our field is intellectually bankrupt.

What’s worse, we have no clue how to find out anything about nutrition.

The only conclusion we can draw, from decades of elaborate and extremely expensive research, is that our research methods don’t work.

Admittedly, in retrospect, many of us were incompetent, were biased or outright corrupted by power interests, or pursued personal food ideologies that had no basis in data. However, even our largest, most careful studies, funded by neutral parties and run by our best scientists, gave only equivocal results.

We’d totally understand if you never want to have anything to do with us again. There’s no reason you should listen to anything we have to say. However, we do have two requests.

  1. We’re pretty darn sure no one else knows anything about nutrition, either. Please don’t listen to “alternative” nutrition quacks. We’ve been there, and we know.
  2. Obviously, there’s no point doing any more nutrition research for the foreseeable future. It would just be more of the same. However, we’d like to ask that some of the nutrition research budget be redirected into meta-nutritional research: to try to understand why we failed, and if there are other methods that might work.
  3. Please eat a healthy, balanced diet.1

Signed,

[Every nutritionist in the world]

1. Just kidding!

Separator

Dear nutrition professionals,

Apparently, you are clueless. You have no idea what your jobs are.

As your employers, we thought we were hiring people with more than two neurons, who could figure out the obvious without having it spelled out completely literally. But no.

Your job is to wear white lab coats while saying that food ingredients are healthy and unhealthy, and to wave charts around. That makes the ingredients authoritatively healthy and unhealthy, which covers our asses.

Some of us have to feed something to school children. Parents demand that school lunches be “healthy.” What does that mean? You don’t know, and we don’t care. What matters is that when parents sue the school district, we can point at you waving charts around. “See! Science! Science says it’s healthy! Go away!”

Some of us have to sell breakfast pastries. Consumers demand that their breakfast be “healthy.” We know you have no idea what that means, because for every ingredient on our master list of industrial food components, you have said it was good one year and bad the next. We made up our own chart, you know? Three columns: ingredient, study that proves it causes cancer, study that proves it prevents cancer. Our food engineers make pastries out of whatever optimizes cost and shelf life, and then the marketing department pastes “Coreopsis free! Now with added chelicerates!” on it. That’s what makes a healthy breakfast pastry.

Some of us make most of what everyone eats: high fructose corn syrup, soy oil, and wheat flour. Just one of our companies sold $81 billion of that stuff last year. It has been authoritatively proven to be healthy. By Science. By you.

Go back to work. Your resignations are hereby rejected. If you refuse to continue waving confusing charts around, we will hire other people who are less fussy. There will be nutritionists; we don’t care whether or not they are you.

Signed,

[The governments of every country in the world, the agriculture industry, the food processing industry, the supermarket industry, and so forth.]

Nutrition: the Emperor has no clothes

Food pyramids

More than a quarter century ago, in “Perfection Salad,” I wrote: “It now seems ludicrous that science should have much to say about cooking… cooking is slowly recovering from ‘domestic science’.” In the 2014 epilogue, I asked: “Has food recovered from domestic science?”

  • “Domestic science” was rebranded as “nutrition science,” with all the same pathologies. That has yielded zero reliable knowledge.
  • Despite complete ignorance, nutrition “science” issued and enforced confident recommendations that may have been responsible for millions of premature deaths, plus great loss of health and quality of life.
  • Meanwhile, industry has developed considerable genuine science of food—oriented to optimizing commercial ends, rather than health and tastiness.
  • Partial public awareness of these problems has produced a proliferation of pseudoscientific, quasi-religious food subcultures.
  • Passionate belief in mythical meanings of food probably have a evolutionary origin.
  • Recently, some pundits have started to suspect that—as I suggested in 1988—no one knows what makes food healthy. Perhaps now the public can begin to resist all claims to authoritative food-knowledge.

Food, eternalism, scientism, and pseudoscience

Nutrition ideologies rest on the eternalist ploy I call “wistful certainty”:

There must be a correct diet; there must be a rational way to discover it

There’s no reason to believe either of those; indeed, there’s strong evidence against each of them.1 The power of wistful certainty comes from the unspoken alternative: “otherwise, we would have no control over our health, Science would fail, and the world would be hostile and unfair and we might as well just give in to hopeless nihilism.”

This ploy underlies both obviously silly New Age nutrition pseudoscience and authoritative state-endorsed nutrition pseudoscience.

What makes you call nutrition “pseudoscience?” That seems like a wild claim. It’s true that it has failed repeatedly, but isn’t that the way science works? We can’t demand certainty; science can only say what is most likely based on the available evidence. It’s true that a lot of studies have been done badly, but that doesn’t invalidate the best work; it just means we need to insist on better experimental methods.

There is always uncertainty in science, but real science gradually establishes some stable facts; it eventually strongly supports some theories and conclusively dismisses others. It is typical of pseudoscience that it does not progress.

Nutrition has made no progress. It has discovered no stable facts. Everything nutritionists have said, they have said the opposite ten or twenty years later (if not much sooner). They literally know nothing.2 After a century of countless experiments, the most common, most basic problem they’ve addressed—the optimal ratio of fat, protein, and carbohydrate—is completely unsolved. If they can’t figure that out, anything more sophisticated seems hopeless.

Nutrition is now both scientism and pseudoscience. This is a somewhat rare combination; cognitive science is another example, as I pointed out in “Perfection Salad.” Scientism—the eternalistic distortion of science into an authoritative source of meaning—is most harmful when the science is bogus. Pseudoscience is most harmful when it gets the support of the state and other powerful institutions. Food and theories of the mind probably both strongly affect human well-being, so they are particularly bad subjects to have turned into scientism or pseudoscience.

My point is not that nutrition is bad science. Unquestionably, it is bad science; a competent statistician, looking at the design of most experiments, will immediately say “this is meaningless; you can’t learn anything this way.”

It’s worse than just incompetence, in two ways. First, as the “resignation letter” noted, even the best studies have been useless. There seems to be something fundamentally wrong, such that doing the same sort of science better wouldn’t help.

The second, still worse implication is that worthless pseudoscience can get treated as authoritative for a century, and even now. This is partly due to rationalist eternalism, and partly due to institutional imperatives produced by malign social dynamics.

In which “Science” kills a few million people

Just when I wrote “Perfection Salad,” in the mid–80s, nutrition had its greatest breakthrough. “Scientists” “discovered” that fat (especially saturated fat, and doubly especially cholesterol) was the cause of the two biggest causes of death in rich countries: cardiovascular disease and cancer.3 Cardiovascular disease is caused by fat (especially cholesterol) accumulating in blood vessels. So, obviously, eating less fat will prevent cardiovascular disease. Cancer is caused by oxygen free radicals chemically modifying fat into a form that attacks DNA, creating mutations, so obviously if you eat less fat, that happens less.4 Besides, fat has twice as many calories as protein or carbohydrate, so obviously if you eat less fat, you won’t get unhealthily overweight.

There was virtually no actual evidence for any of this, but it made sense. (“It makes sense!” is the rationalist basis for all pseudoscience.) “Obviously, it’s urgent that Americans be protected from cardiovascular disease and cancer, so waiting for conclusive evidence before sounding the alarm would be irresponsible.”

A massive public “education” campaign followed. Perhaps astonishingly, in response, Americans dutifully drastically decreased their fat intake (especially cholesterol). This followed the pattern I described in 1988:

Domestic scientists assumed that the ratios of protein, carbohydrate, and fat were relevant variables, and based diet plans on theories of the “correct” ratios. “Nutrition scientists” are still doing this, and so far as I can tell they still don’t know what the “correct” ratios are, because every five years they confidently declare that they have discovered with complete certainty that we should have twenty-three percent or thirty-seven percent or seventeen percent protein in our diets, and American eating habits obediently shift accordingly. Most likely there are no “correct” ratios, because lots of other variables are involved.

An epidemic of obesity began just around the time this “education” campaign began. Health outcomes have been awful. It seems likely that low-fat diet advice actually caused the diseases it was supposed to prevent.5 In any case, most studies concluded that dietary cholesterol does not increase blood cholesterol and does not cause cardiovascular disease; and the saturated fat evidence varies between weak, zero, and counter to the low-fat theory.

Some people started pointing this out more than a decade ago,6 and it’s now nearly the mainstream view. However, nutritional authorities aren’t quite ready to admit to killing a few million people with their bad advice.

In the aftermath of failure

As of early 2015, the establishment is trying to figure out how to retract their anti-fat advice, while doing as little damage as possible to their reputation. They are sending up various waffly trial balloons, experimenting with PR strategies.

Saving nutrition’s reputation is a matter of self-interest. Also, many in the field are probably just too stupid to realize the magnitude of their failure, and honestly assume that somehow Science must know something.

However, more sophisticated players seem to be thinking:

Admitting outright that we were wrong could discredit nutrition permanently—or even Science as a whole. Even though we know nothing now, with better Science, we’ll probably discover the truth soon. It’s critical to preserve respect until then, so people will listen when we get it right. Otherwise, they’ll fall prey to New Age woo and commercial quack diet faddery.

You can hear this in the background of the waffling. I think it is too late; the public is already losing trust.

There’s another problem: if the advice is not anti-fat, what can it be? Some in the field seem to be trying to establish a new consensus, organizing to make anti-sugar the new message. This would take us back to the 1960s–70s, when sugar was the Big Bad. Maybe it is. Who knows? I’m reasonably sure nutritionists don’t.

Another PR strategy has been to blame wrong dietary recommendations on corruption, due to industrial influence. Probably corruption has, indeed, been a significant factor. However, this is a typical example of the eternalist strategy of explaining away failure as due to extraneous factors, which preserves the illusion of present and future competence.

Why has nutrition science failed? At this point, we can’t know. I believe that all available nutrition research funding should be redirected to answering that question. In the mean time, I’ll speculate:

  • It may not matter what you eat. For example, Ioannidis has recently argued that reported nutritional effect sizes must be grossly overstated, and diet may not have a significant effect on health after all. On the other hand, the observation that peoples become much less healthy when they start eating Western food does suggest that diet is significant. However, this might be due to simultaneous adoption of some other, as-yet unidentified harmful aspects of the Western lifestyle.
  • It may be that what makes a healthy diet is so different for different people (due to different genetics and/or lifestyles) that experiments done on mixed populations are meaningless. (I think this is relatively unlikely, for evolutionary reasons, but worth pursuing as a possibility.)
  • An intriguing possibility is that what you eat matters, but not for you. Until recently, all nutritional research assumed that dietary effects worked via human metabolism. Recent studies suggest that gut bacteria play an important role in human health, and that diet affects them much more than it affects human cells. If this is right, biochemical studies of diet have been looking at irrelevant factors for the past century. (I hope this is right, because it might lead to rapid progress, and also because it’s funny.)

Reverse regulatory capture

Honest nutrition scientists would, as in my satirical “resignation letter,” admit that the field has failed, they know nothing, and they cannot now give any meaningful recommendations. I think this would actually be more likely to preserve public trust, in the long run, than the current attempts at waffling and bluffing and muddling. The field is probably too cowardly for honesty, though. The emperor now realizes he has been seen parading naked, but will pretend not to know, to save face.

Anyway, as the “rejection” reply letter explains, institutional imperatives make it impossible to admit ignorance. There will be nutritional recommendations, even if every nutritionist has to be fired in order to create them. Governments, and the food industry, cannot accept that nothing is known, because they would no longer have any basis for their institutional policies. They do not care much what the policies are; but it is critical that they exist.

Initially “domestic science” captured regulators;7 but then state institutions captured nutritional “science.” Once it was established that there were authoritative facts-of-the-matter about what people should eat, state institutions (schools, prisons, the military) needed stable, simple, crisp guidelines about what they were allowed to feed people. For school administrators, it doesn’t matter what the nutritional theory is, but it is critical that there be an authoritative theory they can demonstrate conformity to, in order to remain blameless. So the power here is mainly in the authority-giving power of rationalistic discourse, not in the institutions (much less individuals).

The processed food revolution

In 1988, most American meals were still cooked from scratch. Now that’s rare. Nearly all American food is the product of intensive industrial engineering systems. These rely on new, genuine food science—about how to reliably extrude optimized food-like products, not about what is healthy or (for the most part) tasty. The capture of food by rationality is therefore essentially complete; but it is rationality optimizing for ends we might not choose.

Since we don’t actually know anything about nutrition, it’s impossible to know whether the new engineered food products are unhealthy. From the food industry’s point of view, uncertainty is good, because nowadays any food can be labelled with multiple supposedly-beneficial qualities, according to assorted competing theories (probably none of which have any relationship to reality).8

The obesity epidemic suggests something has gone badly wrong with the Western diet, in which case it must have something to do with processed food, just because nearly all food is now processed.

One of the trial new messages being tested by the nutrition establishment is “avoid processed food,” which has the big advantage (for their future credibility) that no one is likely to adopt it. Cooking has become an unacceptable hassle.9

Public recognition and resistance

Until recently, public opposition to official food recommendations was mainly religious or “ethical.” The monist counterculture (“New Age”), a quasi-religious movement, has produced a series of opposition diets since the 1970s. Although some of these invoked pseudoscience, and made vague health claims, they were all mainly moralistic. They were anti-scientific and anti-capitalist (as monism typically is). The rise of politically-correct food labelling (“fair trade”) may have been partly in response to increasing public realization of the dubiosity of nutritional claims, but it was mainly explicitly ethical.

An uneasy sense that nutrition recommendations had changed too many times, too quickly, seems to have gradually dawned on the public starting about a decade ago. Up until then, almost everyone simply accepted official pronouncements without question. Early 2000s studies supporting the high-fat Atkins diet seem to have shifted the mood. Intelligent people recognized that nutritional advice is uncertain, and liable to change again soon. So then you have to ask: why bother paying attention to the current guidelines?

There’s been another, dramatic change over the past year (starting late in 2014, I think). Science-savvy members of the commentariat—journalists and bloggers—are finally starting to recognize that there is no there, there: nutrition has no cards to play.10

Meaningful food

It’s extraordinary how certain and passionate everyone is about their nutritional beliefs—mainstream or alternative—despite the lack of any basis for them. Religion and politics are the only other domains that commonly inspire such delusional commitment.

Every human culture gives elaborate meanings to food—to hunting, gathering, growing, harvesting, processing, cooking, sharing, and eating it. Every culture has elaborate ideologies of what you should and should not do with food—most of which seem insane to anyone from a different culture. (These constitute the standard example of the eternalist ploy of purity.)

Food is hugely evolutionarily important, so it is not surprising that humans give it such meanings. It’s rather more surprising that something so evolutionarily important should have such divergent meanings attached. Aren’t most of them maladaptive?

A speculation: Perhaps the urge to give foods meanings is a relic of our former hunter-gatherer lifestyle, when keeping track of the edibility, habits, and best use of thousands of species was important. Mythological narratives (“we are forbidden to eat that berry by Flying-Buffalo-Woman, who was tricked with one by Centipede-God”) were valuable as mnemonics encoding cultural knowledge. Often that could be a matter of life and death.

Nowadays, even though the evolutionary purpose is lost, we can’t help making up myths about food, and still feel compelled into believing and enforcing them.

I will discuss the meanings given food again in two later chapters:

  • The ethics chapter considers the moralization of food. There are legitimate ethical questions, but many claims I find highly dubious: not because they are ethically wrong, but because the issues are not ethical ones at all. I use these as examples of a broader phenomenon: the metastasis of morality into domains where it has no business.
  • In the history of meaningness chapter, I will describe how the meaning of food has changed over the past few decades, as we’ve moved through the systematic, counter-cultural, subcultural, atomized, and fluid modes of relating to meaningness.
  • 1. There are healthy non-Western populations with diets very different from each other’s. Some of those may be somewhat better than others, but there’s no strong reason to believe so. A century of scientific research has failed to discover any nutritional facts. More and better research might; but we can’t be certain of that a priori.
  • 2. For “literally know nothing,” see for example the recent Ioannidis editorial in the BMJ. There are two exceptions. First, they know you should shouldn’t eat poisons. Arsenic and polychlorinated biphenyls are bad for you. Second, there are some chemicals (vitamins, for instance) that you have to get some of, or else you get a deficiency disease. Neither of these facts are relevant to anyone with a vaguely normal diet.
  • 3. The supposed connection with cardiovascular disease goes back to the work of Ancel Keys in the 1950s. However, avoiding saturated fat and cholesterol for cardiovascular reasons only became the mainstream message around 1980. The supposed cancer connection was new in the mid–80s, and gave further credence and urgency to the anti-fat campaign.
  • 4. This led also to the recommendation that you should eat more antioxidants. That message is still common, although most follow-on studies of specific antioxidants found that they are bad for you.
  • 5. Since nothing is actually known about nutrition, we can’t be sure the low-fat diet caused the obesity epidemic. Correlation is not causation; but it’s quite suggestive in this case.
  • 6. The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet is supposed to be a good history. I haven’t read it.
  • 7. I described this in “Perfection Salad.”
  • 8. Ioannidis notes that “Almost every single nutrient imaginable has peer reviewed publications associating it with almost any outcome.”
  • 9. Disclosure: I do avoid processed food, and most of what I eat I cook from scratch. This is not advice.
  • 10. The paleo movement has played a major role in this. Paleo is interesting as a subculture that combines romantic rebellion with scientistic rationalism. That potent combination that has made it the most effective anti-authoritarian diet ideology so far. With difficulty, I’ve resisted writing more about that here; this page is already too long.

A malign modern myth of meaningness: cognitive “science”

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

The climax of “Perfection Salad” made fun of “cognitive science.” I dismissed it as a pseudo-science that had twisted our understanding of what people are like. That was in 1988, when people still took it seriously. In the 2014 epilogue, I asked: “Has our understanding of ourselves recovered?”

The short answer, unfortunately, is “no.” The reason is that the delusions of cognitive “science” were transferred to neuroscience, which has continued to propagate the same wrong ideas into mass culture.

“Perfection Salad” was written for an audience of cognitive scientists, just at the time it was becoming obvious that the field had failed. My readers understood the issues in detail, and could see, as they were reading about cupcake recipes, how I was satirizing their discipline. Readers of Meaningness won’t have that background, so I will fill in some explanation here.

However, I can sketch only briefly the cognitivist conception of people and why it is wrong. The background concepts needed to explain exactly what’s wrong come only later in this book. So I won’t try persuade you if you accept those ideas currently.

Instead, this page will explain something of why those ideas matter, where they came from, how and why they traveled from philosophy to cognitive science to neuroscience, and the damage they do.

The “damage” section takes as an example Sam Harris’s justification for America’s wars in the Middle East, supposedly based on cognitive neuroscience as applied to Muslims. I take no position here on those wars. However, his ideas about how Muslim “beliefs” causally result in violence are ludicrous and harmful.

Eternalism in politics

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Political eternalism starts with the wistful certainty that:

There must be a correct system of government; so if we adopted it, it would solve most political problems

This attractive idea—held by nearly everyone—has no basis in reality. It’s a hopeful metaphysical belief, not something grounded in evidence or reason.

Eternalism is the stance that everything has a fixed meaning, given by some sort of Cosmic Plan.

Wistful certainty” is a ploy for maintaining eternalism. The certainty is wistful because, even if there somehow is a correct system of government, we don’t know what it is. That is unacceptable, however; governance is too important for it to be nebulous (uncertain; indefinite). If it were nebulous, the Cosmic Plan would be defective. This creates a cognitive dissonance that eternalism resolves by creating an artificial certainty that some political system is absolutely justified.

This spurious certainty can lead to hideous tyrannies. However, the root problem is just thinking that there must be some correct form. Once you have that idea, it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that whatever form seems best (or is most convenient) is indeed the cosmically right one.

The ploys political eternalism uses to maintain itself in the face of doubt are strikingly similar to religious ones.

Also, for many people, political eternalism functions as an overarching all-purpose foundation for meaning, much as religions can. This has become particularly true in the past hundred years as religions have been widely discredited, but people still feel the need of a foundation for meaning.

This has been discussed widely by social theorists as “political religion”; critics rightly point out that political systems are not actually religions, although they have some of the same functions. The concept “non-theistic eternalism” is helpful here in explaining the similarities.

[This page will provide an overview of political eternalism, introducing a section on the topic. Pages in the section will cover various instances and aspects of the phenomenon.]

[Here’s a nice quote:]

The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it.
—Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, paragraph VI.II.42.

Nihilism: the denial of meaning

The Pillars of Creation (dust clouds in the Eagle Nebula) seen in infrared

Nihilism holds that there is no meaning or value anywhere. Questions about purpose, ethics, and sacredness are unanswerable because they are meaningless. You might as well ask about the sleep habits of colorless green ideas as about the meaning of life.

Nihilism is a mirror image of eternalism—the stance that everything is meaningful. (For an introduction, see “Preview: eternalism and nihilism.”) However, the two stances are not simply opposites; they share fundamental metaphysical assumptions.

Eternalism and nihilism both fail to recognize that nebulosity and pattern are inseparable. Therefore they suppose that “real” meaning would be absolutely patterned: perfectly definite and certain, unchanging and objective. This is their shared metaphysical error.

Eternalism insists that meaning really is like that. That is its second metaphysical error. Nihilism observes, accurately, that no such meaning is possible. This corrects the second error. However, because nihilism shares the first error, it concludes that meaning is impossible, period. This is also wrong; nebulous meanings are “real,” for any reasonable definition of “real.”

Nihilism is attractive to those who have explicitly recognized, understood, and rejected eternalism’s second error: belief in ultimate meaning. That is not easy. Nihilism is, therefore, the more intelligent stance. Or, at least, it’s a stance that tends to be adopted more often by more intelligent people. (It’s even more dysfunctional than eternalism, so we could also call it less intelligent.)

While most people are committed, however waveringly, to eternalism, only a few commit to nihilism. In denying all meaning, nihilism is wildly implausible. Only a few sociopaths, intellectuals, and depressives try to maintain it.

We’ll see, though, that almost everyone adopts the nihilistic stance at times, without noticing. When the complete stance is unknown, nihilism seems like the only possible defense against the harmful lies of eternalism. (Just as eternalism seems like the only possible salvation from the harmful lies of nihilism.)

Even if you are relatively immune to nihilism, it’s important to understand as a prototype. Many other confused stances are modified or limited forms of nihilism. They reject particular types of meanings, rather than rejecting all meaningfulness. That makes their distortions, harms, and emotional dynamics similar to nihilism’s.

Overview

The first page in this section discusses several obstacles you must overcome to even get to nihilism. The main one is the obviousness of meaning. Even before that, you have to let go of the hope that eternalism can somehow be made to work. There are also strong social and cultural taboos against nihilism. Finally, nihilism has nasty psychological side-effects that make you miserable.

The second page explains briefly what it would mean to accomplish nihilism: a state of total apathy. This would, theoretically, end suffering (which is one reason nihilism is attractive). It’s probably impossible, although some religious systems seem to advocate it.

Most of my discussion of nihilism concerns its emotional dynamics. I begin with an analogy: eternalism is like one of those email scams that promises you millions of dollars in exchange for help getting money out of Nigeria. If you fall for that, catastrophic financial loss ensues.

Nihilism entails a similar catastrophic loss: the loss of meaning. The next page gives an overview of our psychological reactions to that loss: rage, intellectual argument, depression, and anxiety. Each gets its own, more detailed page.

In addition, I address the content of nihilistic intellectualization. This is a collection of reasons for rejecting obvious meanings as “not really meaningful.” They are supposedly the wrong kind of meaning; not ultimate, not objective, not eternal, not inherent, or not higher. So what? These arguments are bogus and nonsensical. They usually conceal a hidden motivation: the issue is not qualitative (the “wrong kind” of meaning) but quantitative (available meanings seem inadequately compelling). This is a psychological and practical problem, not a philosophical one, so psychological and practical methods may help.

The antidotes to nihilism are partly intellectual: realizing why it’s incorrect and harmful. Mainly, though, antidotes restore meaningfulness, by making it more powerful, more obvious, more compelling, more enjoyable.

You’ve got nihilism wrong

NASA nebula image

If you think you are not nihilistic—I think you are mistaken.

If you think you are a nihilist—I think you are mistaken.

I hope this chapter on nihilism will be useful both to people who think they aren’t nihilists, and to people who think they are.

Nihilism is a thing you and I, personally, do sometimes. Everyone does, sometimes.

If nihilism were just a conceptual philosophy—something to think and talk about—you could safely ignore it. But doing nihilism is bad for us: bad enough that it’s worth the effort to stop. This chapter explains how.

For non-nihilists: what you can learn from nihilism

I will suggest to non-nihilists that understanding nihilism in detail is important. You are right to reject it: nihilism is harmful and mistaken. However, it is not an abstruse philosophical irrelevance, because everyone falls into nihilism at least occasionally. I’ll suggest that you may be more nihilistic than you realize, and it may be causing you more trouble than you think.

What is at stake here is our understanding and control over our own lives. Nihilism matters because meaning matters, and the best-known alternative ways of relating to meaning are also wrong.

Fear of nihilism is a main reason people commit to other stances, such as eternalism and existentialism, that are also harmful and mistaken. A clearer understanding of what’s wrong with nihilism can help you avoid those too.

For nihilists: this is not the usual denunciation

The usual arguments against nihilism are nonsense. I will confirm that you are right to reject them. I will agree with much of what you believe about meaning, and agree that it is important. Meanings are, for example, not cosmic, eternal, or personal, and this matters.

Realizing that eternalism and existentialism are wrong is the main reason people try to be nihilists, which makes it a more intelligent stance.

However, nihilism itself—“nothing is meaningful”—is harmful and mistaken. This chapter explains why, with detailed analyses that are unlike those you have seen before.

I hope to persuade you that you cannot actually be a nihilist, because you are too intelligent to fully convince yourself that nothing is meaningful. However, committing to nihilism, and attempting to live by it, may be causing you more trouble than you realize.

For both nihilists and non-nihilists: a better alternative

Fortunately, there is another possibility, not well-known, the complete stance. It is not harmful or mistaken.

However, you can only get there once you understand exactly why nihilism and eternalism are both mistakes. That is why you may find it worth your while to read this chapter—whatever you currently think about nihilism.

Rumcake and rainbows

Rainbow
Rainbow image courtesy Eric Rolph

Obviously meaningfulness is either outside your head (“objective”), or else inside your head (“subjective”).

There are excellent reasons to believe it is not outside your head. There are excellent reasons to believe it is not inside your head.

This is the essential argument for nihilism.

But what if meaningfulness is not either inside or outside, and does exist? How could that be?

Where are meanings? A false choice

Kumquats

Three facts seem true:

  1. Meanings are not objective.
  2. Meanings are not subjective.
  3. Meanings exist.

Almost everything said about nihilism assumes these three together form a contradiction. In that case, one of them must be false:

  1. Denying the first fact is eternalism: the stance that meanings are objectively fixed.
  2. Denying the second fact is existentialism: the stance that meanings are subjective, and so can be chosen at will.
  3. Denying the third fact is nihilism: the stance that nothing means anything.

Each of these confused stances is mistaken and harmful. The proper and useful conclusion from the three facts is that meaning is neither objective nor subjective.

Kumquats are neither just nor unjust—and yet, amazingly, they exist! Kumquats are neither triangular nor square—yet, astonishingly, they exist! How on earth can this be!

Kumquats are not a sort of thing that can be just or unjust. Meanings are not a sort of thing that can be objective or subjective.

Triangular and square are not the only shapes. There is also oval. Objective and subjective are not the only ways of being. There is also interactive.

Physical analogies for meaningness

Marbles in and out of a jar

Concepts about meaningness all rest on physical analogies.1 Physical analogies are the basis both of physical explanations of meaning, and of theories that deny meanings are physical.

Unfortunately, these analogies are misleading. That is not because meaningness is non-physical—the explanations I give later in the book are physical. They are misleading because the wrong sorts of physical phenomena get used as analogs.

Nihilism rests mainly on a bad analogy: that meanings have definite locations, like little physical objects. A marble is either in the jar, or out of the jar. Meanings, most people assume, are either inside your head, or outside your head.

But meanings are not specifically located. Neither are some better-understood physical phenomena: reflections, rainbows, and mirages, for instance. At the end of this page, I’ll suggest these are better (though still imperfect) analogies for meaning.

Putting meanings in things

Rum cake
Soaked in meaning

A natural view is that meanings are objective: inherent in things. Consider purpose, for instance, one of the main dimensions of meaningness. The purpose of a pot is cooking. The purpose of wheat is nutrition. The purpose of your stomach is digestion.

This is the way everyone thinks about purpose most of the time, because it’s simple and mostly works. If we left it at that, it would rarely cause problems (despite being wrong). Unfortunately, there are philosophers, who want to make up stories about how things work. So how do inherent meanings work?

Well, humans make things for purposes. So apparently the maker of a pot gives it its purpose. But what about natural things like wheat? Here, we need God, who created the natural things, and gave them purposes. In the Medieval worldview, all things had fixed, intrinsic purposes, according to their kind. Things not obviously useful were created by God to provide moral lessons. The pelican, for example, stabs its own breast to draw blood to feed its children:2 a paradigm of compassionate self-sacrifice.

Likewise, every kind of object has an intrinsic degree of value, according to the Great Chain of Being decreed by God.

On this view, God puts meanings in objects, like marbles in a jar. Or, a better analogy would be the jelly in a jelly donut: you can’t see the meaning just by looking.

Actually, if you cut things open, you can’t find the meaning inside. It doesn’t ooze out. So maybe meaningfulness is more like a fluid that suffuses objects. If you soak a sponge cake in rum, that invisible essence pervades the dessert, and you can’t specifically locate it—although you can taste it.

How does this work? God works in mysterious ways, but how exactly does a human potter put the meaning in the pot? What is this meaning made of, and where do you get it from? If a potter puts a pot-meaning into a hammer, what then? If you always use a pot to hold marbles, instead of for cooking, have you changed its inherent purpose?

As the scientific worldview developed, it became clear that physical objects are “just atoms and the void.” There’s no place inside objects for meanings to hide.

Nothing is inherently meaningful. Nihilism is quite right about that.

This does not mean everything is inherently meaningless! Meanings are not a sort of thing that can be inherent, because they have no specific location. As we shall see.

Putting meanings in minds

Fortune cookie: Zhuangzi say, meanings not in your head

A potter cannot put a purpose in a pot; but the potter knows the purpose of the pot. Perhaps the purpose is inside the potter, not the pot. The potter can explain the purpose of pots to their users, and then it lives inside them too.

Probably in their heads. Like marbles. Although, if you cut open people’s heads, you can’t find any.

So, we invented “minds,” which are metaphysical jars for putting meanings in. Despite being immaterial, the mind is also somehow in the head. Maybe it’s one of those subtle fluids, which pervades the brain, like rum.3

The problem with putting meanings in people’s heads is that people disagree. If meanings were in objects, we could resolve conflicts by determining the objective truth. But disagreement is fatal for all subjective accounts of meaning. This is most obvious in ethics. If I consider eating people OK and you consider it morally wrong, and if what it means to be right or wrong is nothing other than our opinions, then we cannot even begin a discussion. We cannot state any reasons, and there is no way to change someone’s mind. (How would this work in educating children? “Stop biting your sister!” “Subjectively, it is right for me to do so.”)

So, we could put the marbles in God’s head. His job was to keep track of all the meanings for us; and it was jolly decent of him to work so hard at it. Sadly, after a protracted illness, he died in the 1880s. A series of attempts to construct other eternal ordering principles, as replacement meaning-keeping golems, all failed.

Since God joined the choir invisible, most people have held individualistic, subjective theories of meaning.4 Two popular ones are existentialism and the representational theory of mind.

Existentialism says you have to craft your own marbles by hand. It’s frightfully important that yours be different from everyone else’s. You must be creative and artistic and intuitive when making your very own meanings. Also, romantically rebellious and resolute and heroic and stuff. Unfortunately, this project proves impossible: at most, a tiny fraction of personal meanings can be distinctive.

The representational theory of mind says that meanings are like little slips of paper, with the meanings written on them, that live in your head. A cookie fortune is meaningful if you can read it and what it says creates a new relationship between you and the world. Who reads the meanings in your head? How do they create relationships? It takes a billion tiny spooks to do that.

If you are a nihilist, you have understood—correctly—that subjective theories of meaning cannot work. Subjective meaning is none at all.

If you believe in a subjective theory, you may balk at that claim. I’ll give detailed arguments later in the book. Few of those are new or likely to surprise you, though. Subjectivism appears plausible only when it seems the least bad of the three bad alternatives.

So, you may be better persuaded by explanations of how meaning can be neither objective nor subjective, but interactive. Like… a rainbow.

Like a rainbow

Photographer with rainbow

A rainbow is a three-way interaction among the sun, water droplets, and an observer.

A rainbow is a physical phenomenon, but not a physical object. It has no specific location. Two observers standing a hundred feet apart will see “the rainbow” in different places. If you drive toward a rainbow, it appears to recede just as fast, so you can never get to it.

Rainbows are pretty fully understood, and guaranteed 100% metaphysics-free.

Although an observer is necessarily involved, a rainbow is not subjective. It is not “mental,” not an illusion, and does not depend on any magical properties of brains. The observer can just as well be a camera.

The rainbow is not in your head, or in the camera. But it is also not an object-out-there. It is not in the mist, and not in the sun, although both are required for a rainbow to occur.

A rainbow is not “objective” in the sense of “inherent in an object.” It is “objective” in a different sense: the presence of a rainbow is publicly verifiable. Rational, unbiased observers will generally agree about whether or not there is a rainbow.5

To make the analogy explicit, meanings:

  • are interactions among people and circumstances
  • are physical phenomena, but not physical objects
  • have no definite locations (whether inside or outside heads)
  • are observer-relative, to varying extents
  • are usually well-understood, and 100% metaphysics-free
  • are mostly not subjective, mental, illusory, or dependent on magical properties of brains
  • are not inherent in objects
  • mostly are publicly verifiable, so reasonable observers mostly agree about them

This analogy makes plausible the claim that meanings can be non-objective, non-subjective, and existent. That is good enough for this chapter, because nihilism mostly seems plausible only if you accept the forced choice among objectivity, subjectivity, and non-existence.

In nearly every other way, meanings are unlike rainbows, so it’s important not to take the analogy literally. One important difference is that a rainbow’s observer (whether animate or artificial) is mainly passive.6 Observation does not affect the sun or mist. Meanings are activities, in which causality typically runs in all directions.

Rainbows once seemed magical, mysterious, and metaphysical. Now we have a pretty complete understanding of them. Meanings may now seem magical, mysterious, or metaphysical. They’re more complicated than rainbows—but I think we can gain a pretty complete understanding of them too.

I will replace the rainbow analogy with much more detailed and accurate explanations later. These too draw on physical analogs, such as the chaotic pendulum; but mainly on observing meanings directly. As background, the explanations require considerable conceptual machinery that will be unfamiliar to most readers, but fortunately that is not necessary for this chapter.

  • 1. Later in the book, I suggest that metaphysical intuitions about matters other than meaning are also misplaced physical intuitions. This may explain why people defend metaphysical intuitions so strongly, despite their often differing dramatically from person to person, and despite their having no empirical basis.
  • 2. Or so it was believed. Presumably no one has ever observed a pelican doing this, but that doesn’t seem to have been a problem.
  • 3. The mental fluid idea goes back at least as far as Galen, in the second century AD, who called it “psychic pneuma.” Descartes promoted a similar model of “animal spirits”: “a fine wind, or lively and pure flame.” That was highly influential, although conceptually incoherent and anatomically ignorant even for his day. Maybe no one believes this theory now, but it’s still a common way of thinking. For instance, explanations of the extended mind theory are commonly misunderstood as promoting some sort of ectoplasm that oozes out of your skull and goes on astral adventures.
  • 4. Many religious people do commit to the marbles-in-the-mind-of-God theory, of course. I gather that living in a predominantly secular culture makes this difficult to maintain consistently, however. Slipping into a relativist, subjective view is a constant danger.
  • 5. Later, I’ll explain how nihilism and eternalism exploit such ambiguities in “objective” and “subjective” to render plausible reasoning that would otherwise seem plainly false.
  • 6. Although, perception is actually an active process. This turns out to be important in understanding how meaningness does work, and I’ll come back to it in the discussion of objects and boundaries later.

Cold comfort: the false promise of nihilism

Sticker: NIHILIST LIVES DON’T MATTER

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Nihilism’s promise is “you don’t have to care.” Nothing means anything, so why would you.

Nihilism promises evasion of all responsibility. You don’t have to do anything, because nothing matters.

Nihilism promises simplicity, an escape from the wearying complexity of nebulosity.

Nihilism promises certainty: there is definitely no meaning anywhere, so you can give up the fruitless search for its ultimate source.

Nihilism promises cold comfort: you may be miserable, but nothing better than misery is possible. It takes you back to zero; negative utility is just as impossible as positive utility. You are not missing out on anything.

All these promises are lies.

The nihilist elite

Cover of The Platypus of Doom and Other Nihilists

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To commit to nihilism requires unusual intelligence, courage, and grit. Eternalism is for the stupid, the weak, and the lazy. Nihilists know this, and so consider themselves an elite class. Membership in that elite is a major attraction for some would-be nihilists.

Unfortunately, nihilism is also stupid, weak, and lazy.

And, the class pretensions of nihilists are ugly, self-deluding, and sometimes dangerous. Nihilism tends toward fascism: “we are the only ones smart enough and tough enough to face the truth, so we should rule.”

Nihilist elitism depends on the implicit belief that recognizing the meaninglessness of everything is meaningful. That’s self-contradictory.

Nihilism is hard

Gas clouds in the Trapezium of Orion

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It’s a pity that it’s so hard to be a nihilist. Nihilism is mistaken and harmful, but its insights into what’s wrong with eternalism may make it the easiest route into the complete stance.

The obstacles to nihilism are that eternalism—nihilism’s opposite—is attractive; and that nihilism is obviously wrong and harmful. These might seem fatal, except that eternalism is also obviously wrong and harmful. When you have been beaten up by eternalism often enough, nihilism may seem less bad.

In slightly more detail, the obstacles to nihilism are that:

  1. it’s hard to give up hope that eternalism will someday deliver on its promises
  2. there is a strong social and cultural taboo against adopting nihilism
  3. meaningfulness is obvious (so nihilism is obviously wrong)
  4. nihilism’s dire psychological side-effects make you miserable

The first two are “bad” obstacles, in the sense that they are obstacles to the complete stance too. The second two are “good” obstacles, in that they can shift you out of nihilism into the complete stance. I’ll explain each of them further below.

In practice, because meaning is obvious, committed nihilists usually adopt some sort of Nihilism Lite. That is, wavering nihilism secretly admits certain kinds of meaning, while denying others. Much of the rest of the book is about applications of Nihilism Lite in particular dimensions of meaning: stances that reject some meanings and accept others.

190-proof vs. lite nihilism

Yes yes yes how deliciously meaningless
Yes yes yes how effervescently meaningless
Yes yes yes how beautifully meaningless
Yes yes yes how profoundly meaningless
Yes yes yes how definitively meaningless
Yes yes yes how comprehensively meaningless
Yes yes yes how magnificently meaningless
Yes yes yes how incredibly meaningless
Yes yes yes how unprecedentedly meaningless
Yes yes yes how mind-blowingly meaningless
Yes yes yes how unbelievably meaningless
Yes yes yes how infinitely meaningless

Let’s distinguish six attitudes to “nothing means anything”:

  1. Full-strength nihilism: Nothing is meaningful at all. Period.
  2. Nihilism Lite™: OK, maybe some things are “meaningful” in some trivial sense, but not really meaningful. Those meanings don’t count! Therefore, everything is awful.
  3. Miserabilism: Everything is awful, so nothing means anything.
  4. Existentialism: Nothing is objectively meaningful, but subjective meanings are real.
  5. Materialism: There are no higher meanings, but mundane goals like food, safety, sex, power, money, and fame seem meaningful to us, due to evolution.
  6. The complete stance: Meaning is neither subjective nor objective; meanings are real but nebulous; this is fine!

All these might be called “nihilism,” but they are entirely different in their implications, and in their rational and emotional workings. I will devote a page, or several, to discussing each, separately. Here, I’ll summarize my treatment of each, with an eye particularly to seeing the distinctions between them.

Hardcore, full strength, 190-proof nihilism

Let’s say you stopped by the store on the way home from work to get cat food, because your spouse texted you to say that you’d run out. Getting cat food was your purpose for going to the supermarket. Purpose is one of the main dimensions of meaningness. Going to the supermarket was meaningful: if you forgot, your cat would go hungry and would suffer and complain. This meaning is not merely subjective, at least not in the sense that it’s just in your head. Your cat finds food meaningful, too. If you failed to feed your cat for long enough, it might seriously reevaluate your relationship, and there would be consequences. Your spouse might have something to say, too.

Hardcore nihilism insists that, no, actually, you had no purpose in going to the store. The supposed purpose was an illusion. There are no purposes at all.

This is basically just silly, and motivated only by stubbornness. I don’t believe anyone actually holds hardcore nihilism, although some people do try to argue for it publicly. It is a fallback position when you get backed into a corner by someone pointing out that, obviously, many things are meaningful; yet you want to continue to claim to be a nihilist. It’s logically consistent in a way that (as we’ll see) lite nihilism is not; but it requires defiance of all sense and evidence.

Attempts to justify it involve elaborate intellectual obfuscation: sophistical, scientistical, pseudo-rational fallacies. I’ll cover these in later, in “190-proof nihilism: intoxicating intellectual idiocy.”

Nihilism Lite™

Lite nihilism grants the obvious, that some things are meaningful “in some trivial sense,” but insists that they are not “really” meaningful. The kinds of meaning that would actually matter don’t exist, so you might as well just kill yourself.

So you may agree that going to the supermarket was slightly meaningful, in some uninteresting sense; but you hasten to add that this does not imply that Life has an Ultimate Cosmic Meaning, or anything like that! Which is entirely correct. However, it is a different claim from “nothing means anything.”

Lite nihilism starts from the intelligent recognition that the kinds of meaning claimed by eternalism indeed do not exist. For example, meanings are not inherent, or eternal, or perfectly definite or certain. That means that the seductive promises of eternalism are harmful lies. It cannot deliver the benefits of total understanding and control that it advertises.

Lite nihilism’s error is the implication that the kinds of meaning that do exist are all trivial and inadequate. This conclusion is rarely (if ever) spelled out in detail. The typical pattern is to jump from “meanings don’t last forever” to “so everything is worthless,” without explanation. There is a powerful emotional logic to this, but is it correct? What exactly is wrong with non-eternal meanings?

What kinds of meaning do exist, once eternalistic delusions are stripped away? For what purposes, and in what ways, are they inadequate—if they are? These questions deserve careful investigation.

The distinction between 190-proof nihilism and the lite version is rarely made explicit, so we tend to switch between them as needed to make nihilism seem plausible. We can slide from “nothing is inherently meaningful” to “nothing is meaningful” without noticing we’re doing that. In fact, we do that deliberately, to pull the wool over our own eyes.

The promise of nihilism is “you don’t have to care.” This works only if there is no meaning at all. You obviously do care about feeding the cat, so only if that is negated could nihilism deliver any benefit. If you admitted mundane matters like cat food are meaningful, you’d effectively transition from nihilism to materialism. Materialism’s promises and emotional dynamics are quite different. The circumstances in which materialism seems attractive are not the ones in which nihilism is attractive, so you may want to avoid the switch.

So the idea here is to trick yourself into thinking that arguments for lite nihilism (or even materialism) are really arguments for full-strength nihilism.1

In “Why is Lite Nihilism mistaken,” I go through various properties that eternalism claims meaning has, and which lite nihilism rejects. (For example, meanings are not eternal, ultimate, or God-given.) For each, I explain why we should not be upset about meaning not working that way.

Miserabilism

By “miserabilism” I mean the view that everything is awful.2 Thinking that everything is awful is depressing, and depression frequently leads to nihilism. Nihilism also leads to depression, and depression leads to thinking that everything is awful, so all three of these support each other. In experience, “everything is awful” and “everything is meaningless” feel similar, and they usually come at the same time.

However, “everything is awful” is actually an entirely different statement from “everything is meaningless.” In fact they are incompatible, because “awful” is a value judgment—a meaning—and nihilism denies all values. “Everything is awful” can inspire us to work to make things better; it is a potentially powerful source of purpose. By declaring that everything is awful, which is a fixed meaning, miserabilism is technically a species of eternalism! Nevertheless, I’ll discuss miserabilism further in the section on nihilistic depression.

Materialism

The materialistic stance, which rejects “higher” meanings but affirms mundane purposes, is often described as “nihilistic.” Materialism does not meet the book’s definition of “nihilism”—denial of all meanings—but it does have some of the same emotional dynamics. Seeing through eternalist claims about higher meanings hits you with the same feelings of loss as nihilism’s denial of all meanings.

Still, materialism is different enough from nihilism that I devote a separate chapter to it.

Existentialism

I use “existentialism” to mean the idea that meanings must be subjective because they are not objective.3 Then you could either say that subjective meanings are just fine, so there’s no problem; or you could say that subjective meanings are no damn good, so everything is awful.

The “no damn good” conclusion makes existentialism into a branch of Nihilism Lite™. This is what historically happened to existentialism as a cultural movement in the mid-20th century. As existentialists worked out the implications of a subjective theory of meaning, it looked increasingly inadequate and unworkable and led to individual and group rage, intellectual pretentiousness, depression, and angst—the four emotional characteristics of nihilism. As a movement, existentialism collapsed half a century ago.

Many intelligent non-philosophers accept the premise that meaning must be subjective, but don’t see why this should be a problem, and advocate an optimistic existentialism. This stance is rare among academic philosophers.

I think a subjective theory of meaning cannot, in fact, be made to work. Existentialism collapsed for good reasons. The subjective theory of meaning is factually wrong, and trying seriously to make it work leads to nihilism inevitably.

Meaningness develops an understanding of meaning as neither objective nor subjective. Detailed explanation has to be postponed to much later in the book, but there’s a preliminary analysis of existentialism right after I finish with nihilism.

The complete stance (“Joyful nihilism”)

Above, I asked:

What kinds of meaning do exist, once eternalistic delusions are stripped away? For what purposes, and in what ways, are they inadequate—if they are?

This book, Meaningness, could be summarized as an investigation into these questions. It suggests that meaningness is nebulous, which accounts for what’s right in nihilism’s rejection of eternalist meaning. It suggests also that meaningness is patterned: real, concrete, and functional. These patterns are adequate; the nebulosity of meaningness does not imply there is anything wrong with the universe. We can’t get the kinds of meaning some may want, but we can get the kinds we need. Certainty is not possible, but knowledge is; total control is not possible, but strong influence is; complete understanding is not possible, but incrementally better ones are.

Since the complete stance agrees with lite nihilism’s analysis and rejection of eternalism, it might be considered a species of nihilism by some. In fact, I sometimes think of it as “joyful nihilism”—although it strongly disagrees with nihilism’s central claim that “nothing means anything.”

Going through that analysis in detail takes one a fair way toward explaining the complete stance. Upcoming pages will explain why lite nihilism is right to reject eternalism’s characterization of meanings as objective, eternal, inherent, ultimate, and so forth; but wrong to insist that meanings that lack these properties are no good. Accepting both parts of that is tantamount to adopting the complete stance.

  • 1. This is an instance of the “motte and bailey” pattern of fallacious rhetoric. Usually rhetoric is designed to convince other people, but nihilism is mostly something you try to convince yourself of.
  • 2. I have given “miserabilism” this meaning by fiat for the purpose of this book. The word is not widely used and doesn’t seem to have a clear definition. “Pessimism” is often used for everything-is-awful-ism in philosophy, but the everyday meaning of “pessimism” is restricted to the future. Miserabilism is about the present (or near future, as opposed to the long term).
  • 3. “Existentialism” is not a precisely-defined term. The way I’m using it here may not be “standard,” but it’s roughly in-line with some traditional uses.

Spam from God

Jesus with his favorite sheep in a cute-n-cuddly heaven

Confidence tricks have a common structure. The victim is offered something that is too good to be true: great value in exchange for something much smaller.

Critically, the victim’s side of the deal is to do something that is itself unethical. That explains why the offer is so good: not everyone, reasons the victim, would do this deal, so the guy offering it to me has to make it sweet. Once the victim realizes he has been scammed, the illegality of his own action prevents him from going to the authorities.

The most common current confidence trick is the Nigerian “419” spam scam. You get an email that reads like this:

Subject: REQUEST FOR URGENT BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP

DEAR SIR,

I AM THE SON OF A DEPOSED NIGERIAN DICTATOR. DURING THE COUP, I MANAGED TO SNAG $30 MILLION AND STUCK IT IN A SECRET NIGERIAN ACCOUNT. NOW I WANT TO GET THE MONEY OUT OF THE COUNTRY BEFORE SOMEONE NOTICES. PLEASE, I NEED YOUR HELP. I WILL USE YOUR BANK ACCOUNT TO TRANSFER THE FUNDS. YOUR FEE FOR HELPING WILL BE $10 MILLION.

P.S. THIS MIGHT NOT BE EXACTLY LEGAL, SO PLEASE DON’T TELL THE AUTHORITIES. YOUR DISCRETION IS CRITICAL TO SUCCESS.

Kitschy eternalism metaphorically sends you spam that reads like this:

Subject: REQUEST FOR URGENT SPIRITUAL RELATIONSHIP

DEAR SIR,

I AM THE SON OF GOD. I LIVE IN A CUTE ’N’ CUDDLY PASTEL HEAVEN WITH MY FAVORITE SHEEP. I WANT TO GET YOU INTO HEAVEN TOO, BUT I NEED YOUR HELP. UNFORTUNATELY THERE’S LEGALISTIC HITCHES ABOUT SIN AND SUBMISSION TO GOD’S LAW AND STUFF. THEY WOULD SEND PRACTICALLY EVERYONE TO HELL, BUT I’VE FOUND A LOOPHOLE THAT CAN GET YOU INTO HEAVEN ANYWAY. I JUST NEED YOU TO TURN OFF YOUR BRAIN AND PRETEND A BIT AND WE CAN WORK IT OUT.

P.S. DON’T TELL DAD, HE MIGHT GET OLD TESTAMENT ABOUT IT.

This scam is too good to be true—but also too good not to go for. We are all sometimes willing to do violence to our own intelligence in hope of salvation.

And so we all get conned, over and over, by eternalism.

The emotional dynamics of nihilism

The Who—Won’t Get Fooled Again

Nihilism begins with the intelligent recognition that you have been conned by eternalism. Nihilism is the defiant determination not to get fooled again. Having been swindled over and over by false promises of meaning, the nihilist stance refuses to acknowledge even the most obvious manifestations of meaningfulness—lest they, too, turn out to be illusory.

Betrayal and loss

Eternalism makes seductive promises: that you are always loved, that the universe is in good order, that right and wrong can be known for certain, that your suffering has meaning, that you have a special role in creation, that there will be cosmic justice after death.

When you have been disappointed often enough, you start to realize these sweet lies are poison. Such grand promises cannot be kept. Discovering that you have been betrayed by eternalism, and have lost out on the promises it made, is a horrendous emotional blow.

On the last page, I compared eternalism with the Nigerian “419” fraud. Many retired people have lost their entire life savings to this spam-based scam. They face the same set of emotional reactions we have to any other catastrophic loss, such as a divorce following infidelity: denial, anger, arguing, depression, anxiety, and acceptance.1

On this page, I’ll explain briefly the dynamics of these reactions to loss of faith in eternalism. Then I’ll devote a full page to each strategy separately.

Denial: wavering eternalism

One’s first reaction to recognizing the nebulosity of meaningness is to deny it. On some level, you realize that not everything has a definite meaning; that eternalism is false. But since that seems too awful to contemplate, you refuse to admit it. You redouble your insistence that everything is peachy keen—and prepare to do violence to anyone and anything that contradicts you.

This is wavering eternalism. You try to maintain the eternalist stance using ploys such as kitsch, arming, and mystification. These are not nihilistic strategies; but they can easily flip into nihilism, when nebulosity becomes so obvious that pretending becomes impossible.

Anger

Nihilism is a simple inversion of eternalism. It denies that there anything is meaningful at all. At times when meaning is particularly evanescent, when you are particularly bitterly disappointed in it, you may commit to nihilism. “I’ll never get fooled again!”

But this commitment is difficult—probably impossible. Meaningfulness is, at other times, obvious. As a result, in practice all nihilism is wavering nihilism.

Whereas wavering eternalism consists of eternalism plus secret doubt, wavering nihilism consists of nihilism plus secret passion. Passion is the recognition of meaningfulness. To maintain wavering nihilism, you must blind yourselves to meaningfulness, which is even more difficult than blinding yourselves to the nebulosity of meaning.

Rage is one way wavering nihilism reacts to evidence of meaningfulness. This is a defiant negativity: “I don’t care! No matter what you say, I will not admit life is meaningful!” Nihilistic rage wants to destroy whatever has meaning, and whoever points to meaning. (This is the mirror-image strategy to armed eternalism.)

I mentioned that the people most prone to nihilism are sociopaths, intellectuals, and depressives. These are the people best able to deploy the corresponding approaches of rage, argument, and depression. Almost everyone adopts all these strategies at times, however.

Arguing with reality

Eternalism uses willful stupidity to not-see nebulosity. Realizing that you have been duped, and seeing through eternalism’s lies, is intelligent. Mostly, only unusually smart people explicitly commit to nihilism.2

Smart people are used to using clever arguments to get what they want. So it is natural to apply intellectual brilliance to the difficult task of maintaining wavering nihilism, to fight its greatest obstacle: the obviousness of meaningfulness. Nihilistic intellectualization is the counterpart to eternalist kitsch: calm insistence on plainly false claims.

Somehow meaningfulness must be explained away by conceptual sleight-of-hand. A theory that proves “nothing is really meaningful”—in which “really” is the gate to a hell writhing with logical demons—can distract you from the obvious.

This theory has to get complicated quickly in order to be sufficiently confusing, or seem so insightful as to dazzle you into submission. Typically, nihilistic intellectualization involves extreme abstraction, voluminous intricacy, sesquipedalian diction, non-standard logic, and often reflexivity (meta-level analysis). These insulate the argument from checking against everyday experience.3

Because nihilistic intellectualization is often colored by its sister-strategies of anger or depression, it is often aggressive, hostile, cynical, or pessimistic; whereas eternalistic justifications are typically cloying, simpering, naïve, and Pollyanna-ish.

Depression

Realizing that eternalism will always fail often results in anguish, pessimism, depression, stoicism, alienation, apathy, exhaustion, and paralysis.

The loss of guaranteed meaningfulness is a real one, and it is natural to feel sad about it. Depression goes beyond spontaneous sadness, however. It is active and deliberate—although it feels passive and externally imposed.

Nihilistic depression suppresses the feelings (positive and negative) that go with recognition of meaning. Depression can be thought of as rage turned inward. It tries to kill your passionate response to reality.

Depression copes with loss by lowering the stakes. It wants to disengage from problems of meaning by refusing to admit that they are important. If nothing is really meaningful, then the loss of meaning does not matter. Of course, you do care about life. But that is unacceptable when you have committed to nihilism. That caring is the main obstacle to accomplishing nihilism, and depression tries to annihilate it.

Acceptance

Acceptance of both meaninglessness and meaningfulness is the way out of nihilism, and into the complete stance.

One has to fully allow the emotional loss that comes with the collapse of eternalism. The pain of loss is real and cannot be destroyed, talked away, or minimized (as the nihilistic coping strategies attempt to do). You have to admit that you do care, that the world is meaningful, so the stakes are high. But you also have to learn to turn away from eternalism’s alluring promise to remove the pain by restoring fixed meanings.

Conceptual understanding of nebulosity is probably required. Until you understand how meaningfulness and meaninglessness coexist, confused stances alternate, jostling for position as meaning and lack of meaning become more and less obvious. The complete stance remains invisible until you learn the sideways move to nebulosity. Nebulosity allows the coexistence of pain and joy, and reveals the benefits of meaninglessness.

Appropriation

Nihilism’s analysis of the defects of eternalism is largely right. That analysis can be appropriated in the complete stance.

Nihilistic rage can be transformed into clear-minded rejection of fixation; nihilistic intellectualization into non-conceptual appreciation of nebulosity; nihilistic depression into enjoyment of meaninglessness with equanimity.

  • 1. This list is close to Elizabeth Kübler-Ross (On Death and Dying) observation of the stages of emotional reactions to one’s own impending death. Not everyone necessarily has all the same reactions; but it’s a useful framework for the discussion here. She did not consider anxiety a stage, but it is a pervasive feature of grieving, and other experts have suggested that it should be included in the list.
  • 2. This is a generalization, of course. It is possible to make brilliant conceptual arguments in favor of eternalism (usually in defense of a system, such as an eternalist religion or political ideology). There are probably also stupid people who commit to nihilism (although I have not come across one).
  • 3. Nihilistic intellectualization is characteristic of postmodernist thought. I will have much more to say about postmodernism later in the book.

Nihilistic rage

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This will expand on a section in “Wavering nihilism: emotional dynamics.”

Nihlistic intellectualization

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

This page will explain ways we use spurious pseudo-rational arguments to justify nihilism by explaining away meaningfulness. It will expand on a section in “Wavering nihilism: emotional dynamics”; you can read the summary there.

The following quote from a Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article is a somewhat extreme case. It illustrates the general theme nicely, although I am sure you would never think anything so silly!

In the past 10 years, some interesting new defences of nihilism have arisen that merit careful consideration. According to one rationale, for our lives to matter, we must in a position to add value to the world, which we are not since the value of the world is already infinite (Smith 2003). The key premises for this view are that every bit of space-time (or at least the stars in the physical universe) have some positive value, that these values can be added up, and that space is infinite. If the physical world at present contains an infinite degree of value, nothing we do can make a difference in terms of meaning, for infinity plus any amount of value must be infinity.

Nihilistic depression

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This will expand on a section in “Wavering nihilism: emotional dynamics.”

Nihilistic anxiety

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Nihilistic anxiety is also called existential angst.

Nihilistic anxiety is pervasive; it is not about anything in particular.

Not being able to make sense of specific things naturally causes anxiety about them, because of uncertainty. Not being able to make sense of anything—a consequence of nihilism—causes non-specific, pervasive anxiety.

The underlying worry is that our perception of meaningness is unreliable. Therefore, there is no sensible way to choose activities. Paralysis results. Anxiety alienates one from all projects, and from social involvement. This is depressing.

Whereas nihilistic rage, intellectualization, and depression include active strategies for stabilizing nihilism against the threat of meaningfulness, anxiety is purely a consequence.

“Cosmic horror” fiction—such as Lovecraft’s Cthulhu stories—express nihilistic anxiety. They convey the feeling that everything is horrible and doomed, without making any actual sense. As I’ve written elsewhere, this is silly (although fun if you don’t take them seriously).

Actually, in nihilistic anxiety and depression, everything shows up as existent but meaningless, and therefore silly. This includes oneself. In existentialism, this is called “The Absurd.”

Perceiving this absurdity is valuable, because it’s funny—or can be. Laughter is enjoyable, which points to a route out of nihilism.

Finding meaninglessness enjoyable is necessary to stabilize the complete stance, so this is a particularly good way out.

Sartre’s ghost and the corpse of God

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In this book, existentialism means the stance that meaningness is subjective. In contrast, eternalism and nihilism both assume that meaningness must be objective.

Existentialists also say that for meaning to be “authentic,” it must be a purely individual creation. Meaning should be a perfectly free choice, made after you have thrown off all cultural assumptions and social pressures. That is not actually possible, and existentialism collapses into nihilism if you seriously attempt it.

The complete stance is that eternalism, nihilism, and existentialism are all equally wrong. Existentialism is a mere muddled middle: an attempt at compromise between eternalism and nihilism that fails because it shares with them an underlying metaphysical assumption. The assumption is that meanings can be localized inside things. Eternalism supposes the meaning of an object is inherent in it (and external to us), so it is objective. Nihilism (correctly) points out that meanings cannot be inherent, and (wrongly) concludes that they cannot exist.

Existentialism supposes the meaning lives inside your head (so it is subjective, internal, and individual). This is also wrong. I will explain later why meanings logically can’t be subjective. They also can’t be individual: they are inherently social. Also, we don’t have perfectly free will to choose meanings. We are constrained by, and unavoidably depend upon, biology and society and culture.

If you try to maintain the illusion that existentialism is possible, you will probably end up adopting the stance of True Self—an idealized ego that would have the capacity to make an individual judgement. You are also likely to make the quest to find your personal meanings into a mission. These hopeful fantasies tend toward eternalism—which can make existentialism attractive. However, both these confused stances are harmful and mistaken.

Many intelligent people nowadays recognize that meanings cannot be objective, and commit to the existentialist stance. Some know the history, and call themselves existentialists. But existentialism conclusively failed half a century ago, so the word sounds quaint and dated, and most people who adopt it now don’t realize that’s what they are doing. Many think they’ve invented a clever personal philosophy—with no clue why it won’t work.

If you seriously attempt existentialism, you will fail. You cannot create your own meanings. If you take that failure seriously, and analyze what went wrong, you may recognize that subjective meanings are impossible. Then—since objective meanings are also clearly impossible—you will end up in nihilism.

The way out is to recognize that meaningness is neither subjective nor objective. It is a collaborative accomplishment of dynamic interaction. One might say that it lives in the space-between subject and object; or that it pervades the situation in which it manifests, including both subject and object. But these metaphors are misleading; meanings simply don’t have locations.

Meaningness: the complete stance

If you arrive unfamiliar with the term “complete stance”: postpone this page! It will seem boring and technical. Instead, read “Preview: eternalism and nihilism” for an introduction to the topic.

Dramatic cloudscape over Sydney opera house
Image courtesy Trey Ratcliff

The complete stance recognizes that meaningness is both nebulous and patterned. Put another way, it neither fixates nor denies meanings. Or, equivalently: it enables the realistic and creative possibilities that emerge when you let go of eternalism and nihilism simultaneously.

The complete stance looks unattractive from a distance because—unlike eternalism and nihilism—it does not claim to be The Ultimate Answer. Unlike eternalism and nihilism, it makes no comforting promises of certainty, understanding, control, or non-responsibility.

From a distance, it also looks dauntingly complicated, because it works with both pattern and nebulosity, plus their intricate interrelationships.

You are already in the complete stance

From its own point of view, the complete stance is simpler than either eternalism or nihilism. It sees only one thing (meaningness) not two (meaning and meaninglessness). It does not attempt to divide pattern from nebulosity—an artificial and impossible separation that causes endless complications.

It’s always obvious that meaningness is both nebulous and patterned. This means that the complete stance is also obviously right.

Because it is obviously right, we are all always already in the complete stance.

Maintaining the confused stances—eternalism, nihilism, and existentialism—is actually impossible, because they are obviously wrong. At some level, we are always aware that they require extensive make-believe.

Nevertheless, we are usually somewhat effective at pulling the wool over our own eyes, using the eternalist ploys and nihilist evasions. So we often act as if we were genuinely eternalists, nihilists, or existentialists; and this has awful consequences.

The complete stance looks boring from a distance

The road to the complete stance appears dull, at first, because it is obvious. The way is deflationary: it strips away the enticing dramas of the confused stances:

Eternalism
“You are on a Mission from God to fulfill the Ultimate Meaning of the Universe!”
Nihilism
“You have seen through the illusion of meaning and joined the intellectual elite who recognize the hard and cold reality of Ultimate Meaninglessness!”
Existentialism
“You have thrown off the fetters of mindless social conformity, and have the courage to create your own meanings out of raw nothingness!”

We manufacture these dramas because we fear that actually-existing meanings are inadequate. But—exciting, colorful, and appealing as fantasy-meanings may be—they are imposed, delusional, and noxious. We are better off without them.

Freedom from metaphysical delusions

The negative definition of the complete stance, as not fixating or denying meaning, is unappealing. However, it points to the main promise: freedom. Freedom from metaphysical delusions, and their propensity to limit action.

The shared metaphysical error underlying eternalism and nihilism is that the only meaningful kind of meaning would be non-nebulous: objective, eternal, distinct, changeless, and unambiguous. Recognizing that meanings are never that way, yet real all the same, is a more positive definition of the complete stance.

This chapter will begin to answer the question “how can meaning be nebulous and yet patterned?”—although bits of explanation will be scattered through the rest of the book. Partly that is because various seemingly-disparate and unfamiliar concepts are necessary as background, and I introduce those only gradually.

Mainly, however, “how” is not the point. This book is not academic philosophy. Meaningness aims to be a practical guide to working with meaning, not an abstract treatise attempting to explain it. Practically speaking, what is necessary is to recognize that meaningness is nebulous yet patterned, not to understand exactly how that can be.

Finding, stabilizing, and accomplishing the complete stance

We may begin by asking:

What is creative, but not eternalistic?
What is realistic, but not nihilistic?

Dropping attractive delusions is the antidote to eternalism. Allowing meanings to be as they are is the antidote to nihilism. Then you discover that meaningness is adequate after all—more than adequate—wondrous, delicious, and vivid!

If we are always already in the complete stance, are we already done? No. The aim is to stabilize the complete stance, so we fall back into confused stances less often; and to gain skill in working with fluid meaningness.

Curiosity, enjoyment, and creativity are three aspects of that skill.1 These are not separate; just three different ways of talking about the same art. I will say something about each in this chapter; and more throughout Meaningness.

Because this whole book is about finding, stabilizing, and accomplishing the complete stance; and because the stance is—from its own point of view—so simple and obvious, the chapter is quite short.

  • 1. Vajrayanists will recognize these—along with “wondrous, delicious, and vivid”—as structural equivalents of “coemergent emptiness, bliss, and clarity,” respectively.

No cosmic plan

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

This page will summarize the consequences of the fact that there is no “cosmic plan” or eternal ordering principle to the universe.

Most ideas about meaningness assume that meaning requires one; so if there isn’t one, nothing can be meaningful. But this is mistaken; which means that most ideas about meaningfulness and meaninglessness are mistaken.

I have written a little about the absence of a cosmic plan over at Approaching Aro.

Unity and diversity

Monism is the idea that “All is One.” Dualism is the idea that the world consists of clearly separate objects. These ideas may seem abstract, and irrelevant to your life. However, they are central to many religious, political, and philosophical systems. Therefore, it’s important to understand why both are wrong, how they are harmful, why they are attractive, and a better alternative.

Monism and dualism are, at root, ideas about boundaries, objects, and connections. Are all things One, without boundaries? Or many separated objects? Is everything totally connected? Or is every object a clearly distinct individual?

I will begin by answering “no!” to all those questions. Realizing that the everyday world doesn’t work in either a monist or a dualist way undercuts the intuitions that make these ideas seem reasonable.

Then I will look at first monism, and then dualism, in detail. Finally, I’ll describe participation, the complete stance I recommend as a third alternative. The rest of this page summarizes these three stances.

Monism

The boundary that people care about most is the boundary between the self and the world. Denying and fixating that are the most significant applications of monism and dualism.

If All is One, then there is no boundary, and you are really the entire universe. Typically, monists say that the universe is equivalent to God, so you are actually also God. As you realize everything is totally connected, you develop the ability to affect anything you want.

This is the ultimate fantasy of power and invulnerability. However, convincing yourself that you are All-powerful, when you aren’t, does not make your life go well.

When the fantasy collides with reality, monists retreat into a make-believe magical world. Monism produces dreamy spaciness, refusal to make any clear distinctions, refusal to judge. This leads to drifting through life, expecting other people to clean up your messes, contributing nothing except spiritual clichés mouthed at unwanted times.

As a social ideology, monism tends toward totalitarian denial of individuality.

Dualism

The nebulosity of the self/other boundary means that we cannot even control our selves. What we call “self” constantly gets bits of “other” blended into it. That’s what perception does, what communication does, what interacting with the material world does.

The fantasy of dualism is that a clear separation between you and others frees you from their contaminating influence, and from responsibility to the world.

Dualism, by blinding you to connections, makes it easy to evade ethical responsibility for consequences. Psychologically, it produces alienation from the natural world, from other people, and from the sacred. As a social ideology, dualism tends toward denial of collective responsibility.

Participation

Participation is the stance that revels in the extraordinary variability of the world, that loves and engages with specifics and individuals; and also appreciates the porous self/other boundary, works skillfully with diverse connections, and accepts responsibility for whatever you encounter.

Schematic overview: unity and diversity

Stance Monism Dualism Participation
Summary All is One I am clearly distinct from everything and everyone else Reality is indivisible but diverse
What it denies Differences, boundaries, specifics, individuality Connection, dynamic interplay, unbounded responsibility
What it fixates Unity; also over-emphasizes connection Boundaries, separateness, limitations, definitions
The sales pitch You are God Clarity gives you control
Emotional appeal I am all-powerful, all-knowing, immortal, invulnerable I am not contaminated by other beings, and have only specific, limited responsibility for them
Pattern of thinking Willful stupidity Distrust Engagement
Likely next stances Eternalism, mission, true self, specialness Can combine with either eternalism or nihilism
Accomplishment Directly perceive all things as One Perfect independence Self and other neither distinct nor identical
How it causes suffering Have to blind self to diversity of physical reality Alienation due to being cut off from world and others
Obstacles to maintaining the stance Obviousness of diversity Obviousness of connection Difficulty of understanding the philosophical view
Antidotes; counter-thoughts Appreciation of diversity Appreciation of connectedness
Intelligent aspect I am not entirely separate from anything The world is endlessly diverse
Positive appropriation after resolution Provisional understanding of indivisibility Points toward appreciation of diversity

Monism and dualism contain each other

Yin/Yang symbol
Pathological counter-dependency

Monism and dualism are opposites. But because each is obviously wrong, each turns into the other when cornered. A devious trick!

Monism is the stance that fixates sameness and connections, and denies differences and boundaries. Dualism is just the other way around: it denies sameness and connections, and fixates differences and boundaries.

Both these confused stances sometimes show themselves to be obviously wrong. The complete stance of participation recognizes that samenesses and differences, boundaries and connections, are all real, but also always somewhat nebulous: ambiguous and fluid. This is obviously accurate, but usually less convenient. Monism and dualism are simpler, and deliver particular emotional payoffs—some of the time.

The monism within dualism

All boundaries are somewhat vague. This is true of physical boundaries, and of abstract category boundaries. Sometimes you cannot say on which side of the boundary something falls—not for lack of knowledge, but because there is no right or wrong answer. This is intolerable for dualism.

Confronted with this nebulosity, dualism tries to harden the boundary by putting everything clearly on one side or the other. How? What defines a boundary? Everything inside the boundary is one way, and everything outside is the other way. Dualism exaggerates the commonality of everything inside, and the commonality of everything outside. It forces a choice onto items near the boundary, which must conform to one criterion or the other.

Dualism thereby imposes an impression of homogeneity. Everything inside is, ideally, exactly the same, and perfectly connected to everything else within. Everything outside is also exactly the same. So, on either side of the boundary, dualism turns into monism!

This dynamic is closely related to essentialism, which is a typical strategy for justifying the equivalence of the apparently dissimilar. “These two might look different,” essentialism says, “but they are essentially the same.” The “essence” is an invisible, magic, indwelling property that dualism claims explains the commonality, but that cannot be detected by any ordinary means.

Particularly harmful examples of monism-within-dualism are found in ideologies governing social groups. (Religions, political orientations, and ethnicities are typical examples.) The group presses its members all to be the same; to be our kind of person. Everyone outside is treated as interchangeably the wrong kind. The ideology has no room for anyone near the border. It does not accept that people on either side vary among themselves. The amount of pressure for conformity, and for rejection of outsiders, is a measure of how pathologically dualistic the group’s functioning is.

The dualism within monism

Confronted with patterns of distinction, monism attempts to force universal homogeneity. Sameness is good; difference is bad. Pointing to unity is holy; pointing to distinctions is materialistic selfishness.

Everything and everyone is included within the One. The One is All. Anything that appears not to be included must be assimilated. Anything that cannot get fitted into the One is wrong and must be destroyed.

To see that everything is totally connected is enlightenment. To misunderstand things as separate is the root of all evil.

There must be no differences in value; everything and everyone is equal. Nothing is better than anything else. You must accept this. Claims of inequalities are discrimination; prejudice; intolerance. We must not allow intolerance; that is absolutely unacceptable. Intolerant people are ignorant and inferior.

In sum: when monism encounters a difference it cannot ignore, it turns into dualism—often a particularly absolutist and pathological dualism.

Some “spiritual” ideologies are the clearest examples of monism. They can be highly intolerant of anyone recognizing distinctions they deny, or rejecting imaginary connections they fixate. They may denounce non-believers as “scientistic materialists,” for example. As everyone knows, scientistic materialism is responsible for war, capitalist exploitation, the ecological rape of the planet, chemtrails, and vaccine-induced autism. None of those awful things would be allowed if everyone realized everything was connected.

Monist religions are exceptionally evangelical, pursuing an embrace, extend, extinguish strategy. Perennialism is the claim that all religions are essentially the same. Specifically, they are essentially the same as monism. We should accept and include all religions, as different paths to the same Truth. Christianity, for example. Essentially, the message of Christianity is that you should emulate Jesus. Jesus is essentially God, who is essentially The One that is All. You emulate by realizing your essential sameness. So, really, the aim of Christianity is to discover that you are God, who is The Entire Universe.

This is a dire distortion of Christianity, which is a dualistic religion. None of Christianity—sin, salvation, the afterlife—makes any sense if you are “really” God. Nevertheless, many supposed Christians have converted to monism without noticing, and are unable to see any difference between the two. Monism, extolling tolerance, begins by saying that Christianity is totally true, but it eventually explains that old fashioned Christians are doing it wrong, because the “real” Christianity is actually monism. Christianity is only true insofar as it is monism.

Monism uses the same embrace-extend-extinguish strategy against Buddhism. Centuries ago, monist proponents of Hinduism “benevolently included” Buddhism as a “totally valid branch” of the greatly diverse tree of Hinduism. Then they insisted that everything about it was not quite right and must, step by step, be replaced with Hinduism. This was part of the reason Buddhism went extinct in India. In the past few decades, “spiritual but not religious” monism has infected modern Buddhism and mostly eaten it from within. It will be interesting to see how long Islam—perhaps the most dualistic of all religions—can withstand this virulent pathogen.

Egalitarian political ideologies also can fall into the intolerant monism that is dualistic in its approach to opponents. This is the pattern of “political correctness,” which says that everyone must be included, all beliefs must be accepted, and everyone is perfectly equal. Except for people who are not politically correct. They must be cast out. Their beliefs are unacceptable and must be silenced. They are ethically inferior; that’s their essential and permanent nature, and no amount of repentance and purification can redeem them.

The boundary between sameness and difference is nebulous yet patterned

Monism and dualism are mirror-image attempts to separate sameness and difference.

This is typical of confused stances, which come in pairs of apparent opposites. Each pair shares an underlying, unrecognized mistaken metaphysical assumption. The confused opposition can be resolved by making the assumption explicit, understanding why it is wrong, and replacing it.

The metaphysical assumption shared by monism and dualism is that boundaries must be perfectly solid, objective, eternal, clear, and definite. Monism recognizes, accurately, that there are no completely hard boundaries—but then wrongly denies that there are any differences at all. Dualism recognizes, accurately, that distinctions are important—but then wrongly fixates them.

All boundaries are somewhat nebulous; yet the patterning of the world implies that boundaries are everywhere.

There is never a perfectly definite fact-of-the-matter as to whether two things are the same or distinct. Any two things are somewhat different and somewhat similar; somewhat separated and somewhat connected. Understanding and acting on this is the complete stance, participation. It is “complete” in recognizing both sameness and difference, separation and connection.

I have used the yin/yang symbol, at the top of this page, to illustrate the pathological hard distinction between monism and dualism—the two colors in the figure. Each teardrop shape contains within it a distinct circle of the other color, which I am using to symbolize the inclusion of the opposite stance within each.

I know little about the Taoist philosophy in which the yin-yang symbol originated. I gather, though, that its metaphysics may approximate “participation.” In that case, the hard edges between black and white in the figure are misleading. As a symbol of participation, it would be more accurate if they shaded into each other. And not just gray between black and white. It would be more accurate, too, if the two halves of the diagram each showed contrasting but harmonious patterns of diverse colors.

Perhaps the ancient Chinese sages would like to commission me to redesign their sacred symbol? I haz mad graphic design skillz, and my rates can be quite reasonable on major jobs.

Further reading

The Guru Papers presents an outstanding analysis of the pathologies of monism, its denial of differences, and its trick of turning into dualism when that fails. I have posted my notes on it here. The most relevant part starts with the note for page 303.

Rethinking Pluralism: Ritual, Experience, and Ambiguity explores the pervasive nebulosity of all categories, and analyzes the pathologies of dualism and its fixation of boundaries. The book develops methods for working effectively with ambiguities of sameness and difference, avoiding both monism and dualism.

Both these books are particularly concerned with pathologies of monism and dualism in political and religious groups.

In “Inclusion, exclusion, unity and diversity” I wrote about a monist aspect of “Consensus Buddhism” (the white American Buddhist mainstream). The Consensus claims to include everyone, while deliberately excluding most Buddhists. This is a case of “dualism within monism” particularly close to home for me.

Boundaries, objects, and connections

Blueberry jam in jar: how many objects?

Monism is the idea that “All is One”; dualism, that the world consists of clearly separate objects. To start, we need an understanding of what it means to be one thing, or a separate thing, in general. Then we can look at what it would mean for the entire universe to be one thing, or many separate things, and what might follow from that.

There is a jar of blueberry jam on my breakfast table. I could pick it up and toss it in the air and catch it. The lid is screwed on tight, so it will hold together. The jar won’t stick to the table or to my hand.

So, intuitively, an object is a bunch of bits that are connected together, and aren’t connected to other things. The boundary of the object is where the connections stop.

These definitions are often useful in practice. However, they also often don’t work.

Are a glass jam jar, its metal lid, and the jam itself one object, or three? It depends on what I’m doing with them. If I’m moving bottles around in the fridge, looking for the mustard, I’ll treat the jar with lid and contents as one object. That’s true even if I carelessly left the lid unscrewed and it could fall off. If you have a naked waffle and ask me to “pass the jam, please,” the jar and jam are the one object I’ll pass you—but I wouldn’t include the lid. If I’m polite, I might actually remove the lid before passing the jam.

And then there is the jam itself, as I stir it into my yogurt. It’s not object-like at all. It will stick to my hand, or to the table, if I spill a bit. It’s sticky blobby goo, with semi-squashed bits of blueberry. Are the blueberry bits separate objects or not? It’s impossible, if I poke at them, to say where their boundaries lie; they fade off indeterminately into the more liquid parts of the jam. Mixing it into the yogurt, the boundary between the two substances becomes gradually, increasingly obscure, indefinite, non-existent.

A cloud is a particularly dramatic example of ideas about objects not working. (That is one reason I use the word “nebulosity” so often; it means “cloud-like-ness.”) Seen from afar, you can say that this cloud and that one are definitely distinct. Yet as you get close, you find that a cloud has no boundary at all. And, there are no connections holding it together.

So, what is going on here? The world is not objectively divisible into separate objects. Boundaries are, roughly, perceptual illusions, created by our brains. Moreover, which boundaries we see depends on what we are doing—on our purposes.

However, boundaries are not just arbitrary human creations. The world is immensely diverse. Some bits of it stick together much more than other bits. Some bits connect with each other in many ways besides just stickiness. The world is, in other words, patterned as well as nebulous.

Therefore, objects, boundaries, and connections are co-created by ourselves and the world in dynamic interaction.

Monism—“All is One”—is the denial of boundaries. It recognizes, accurately, that there are no objective boundaries, but then insists that this means there are really no boundaries at all. (Or, that boundaries are merely subjective, purely creations of the mind, which is almost as wrong.)

In the same way, monism tends to over-emphasize connections. “Everything is totally connected” is a typical false monist claim. Everything is connected—by gravity—but most things are not connected in any meaningful way. Monism sees connections that don’t exist, producing a magical world view. (Misunderstood “quantum physics” is a common justification.)

Dualism is the fixation of boundaries. It insists they are perfectly well-defined and objective. It also tends to deny connections that actually do operate.

The next several sections of the book explain how boundaries, objects, and connections work in detail. Along the way, I’ll have more to say about nebulosity and pattern. Also, I’ll lay the groundwork for understanding participation, the stance that resolves the mirror-image confusions of monism and dualism. Part of that is explaining “neither subjective nor objective, but interactive”—a theme that will be important throughout the book.

If what I said on this page was convincing, you could skip ahead, to the detailed discussions of monism, dualism, and participation.

However, the idea that the world is not made up of clearly separable objects, but is also not just one big blur, may be unfamiliar. Some readers may resist these claims; so I will explain in depth.

You may also find my explanation of how things are interesting just for its own sake.

Non-existence: Scarlet Leviathan

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The question of existence and non-existence is a colossal red herring.

Many metaphysicists, both in the Mahayana Buddhist tradition and in the recent analytic tradition, have used sorites arguments to convince themselves that ordinary objects, such as pots and people, do not exist. This is a dire confusion.

Framing the problem as “whether and how objects exist” leaves the objects unchallenged and problematizes a property they may possess (viz. existence). But it is objectness that is problematic, not existence!

This page will review the history of the confusion. I'll cover particularly the Madhyamaka arguments of Nagarjuna, which were actually the starting point for Meaningness; and the analytic mereological tradition that begins with Peter Unger, who wrote a paper titled “I do not exist.”

Part of the problem is a common pattern in metaphysics, of mistaking physical intuitions as metaphysical intuitions. Another problem is a consistent failure to ask what “exists” even means—if anything. I will give a sketch of an answer to that.

Then I'll explain that the sorites arguments have nothing to do with existence; correctly understood, they problematize boundaries, and therefore the concept “object” instead.

Monism: the denial of difference

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While this page is unwritten, see the chapter introduction for a better explanation. What follows is a very abstract summary of some key points.

Monism is the stance that All is One. It denies separateness and diversity.

Monism is motivated by the unacceptability of specifics. Facts about one’s self, life, experience, and the world seem unattractive, and inessential. Monism holds that the essential is the abstract and general, instead—and those are seen as pure and all-good. The physical world, as it appears, is an impure illusion, which should be transcended.

Monism holds that all religions and philosophies are essentially the same, and that they point at the same ultimate truth. Namely, the truth of monism! This is a clever strategy for assimilating and extinguishing competing systems. To insist that “No, actually, our system contradicts yours” sounds aggressive and “not-nice”; but actually it is monism that has imperialistic aspirations.

Monism holds that the true self is mystically identified with the One or Absolute or God or Cosmic Plan.

Critiques of monism

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Monism can be criticized from the points of view of dualism, nihilism, or the complete stance.

The dualist and nihilist critiques of monism appear to have lost some of their effectiveness recently. The new monist pop spirituality has flown in the face of these critiques. It appears to have developed a new rhetorical technique for bypassing them.

I hope that a new critique, based in the complete stance, will be more effective.

The dualist critique of monism

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According to dualist eternalism, monism is wrong because it is not possible to achieve union with God.

If it were possible, the core logic of dualist eternalism—sin and salvation—would fail.

This critique is decreasingly effective, because more and more people reject the authority of the established (dualist) religions, and see no argument that unity with God is impossible, beyond “priests say so.”

For further reading, before I write this section: the Vatican has published, online, a very nicely done criticism of the New Age, much of which applies to monism more generally. (The New Age is pervasively monist.)

The nihilist critique of monism

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The nihilist critique of monist eternalism is that it is factually false.

Although this critique is correct, it has recently become decreasingly effective. Widespread skepticism about the authority of science, and increasing acceptance of the view that “all beliefs are equally valid,” allow people to dismiss factual accuracy as irrelevant to spiritual truth.

The complete stance’s critique of monism

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From the point of view of the complete stance, monist eternalism fails on its own terms. It cannot deliver what it promises.

Dualism: the fixation of difference

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While this page is unwritten, see the chapter introduction for a better explanation. What follows is a very abstract summary of some key points.

Dualism is the stance that individuals can be unambiguously identified and separated. It fixates boundaries and denies connections.

In the dualistic stance, the self exists separately from other people, from the world, and from any sort of eternal ordering principle such as God. Fear of contamination by the nebulosity of reality—always changing and ambiguous—motivates dualism.

Dualism comes in both eternalist and nihilist forms. Eternalist dualism is typical of traditional Western religions. It holds that the true self, or soul, is separate from God, or other eternal ordering principle. God is transcendent and separate from the world. (Eternalist monism, by contrast, asserts the ultimate identity of God, the world, and the soul.)

The scientific-materialist world view tends toward nihilist dualism (although it is possible to hold a scientific-materialist view without either nihilism or dualism). On this view, individuals exist separately, but have no real meaning or purpose.

Participation

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

This page is unwritten. See the chapter introduction for some explanation. What follows is a very abstract summary of some key points.

Reality is indivisible but diverse. Boundaries and connections are both nebulous, but both real. They are neither objective nor subjective; neither inherent in the world, nor personal choices. They shift to serve practical functions, but cannot be merely imposed or arbitrary. They are accomplished through meaningful social activity of interpretation

Selfness

“Selfie”

(CC) Clauds Claudio

We are awash in ideological crazy-talk about “the self”:

  • Moralists say we have to overcome our selves because they are selfish
  • Psychotherapists say most people’s aren’t working well, and need tune-ups using their expert understanding of how selves should work
  • Spiritual teachers say we have somehow misplaced and forgotten our true selves, and must go on quests to find them
  • Most implausibly, Buddhists say the self does not exist—and, worse, many pop science writers agree!

Unfortunately, we cannot ignore these discordant voices, because questions of self are inseparable from questions of meaning: purpose, ethics, authority, and personal value.

Uneasily, we apply bits of all these stories about “self” in different circumstances. We might study one theory or many in detail, trying to make sense of our selves. Mostly, though, we try not to think to much about questions of self; it is anxiety-provoking, and experience shows it usually doesn’t lead anywhere useful.

Confused stances rest on an unnoticed, mistaken metaphysical assumption: that “the self,” if any, must be a durable, separate, continuous, well-defined thing. Then these stances claim that there is such a thing (but maybe you have the wrong sort); or that there isn’t one (and you are stupid and doomed if you disagree); or that there ought to be one (so you need to create or find it); or that there ought not to be one (so you need to get rid of yours).

“Self” contrasts with “other”; between them, there must be a boundary. The last chapter explained how boundaries are always nebulous: vague, changeable, and purpose-dependent. This is especially true of the self/other boundary. Where we draw it varies according to what we are doing—and rightly so. The same applies to boundaries between different parts of the self (insofar as it is meaningful to speak of “parts of the self” at all).

We saw that there are two confused stances concerning boundaries: monism, which denies boundaries, and dualism, which fixates them. We’ve also discussed two other fundamental confused stances: eternalism insists that everything is meaningful; nihilism denies all meaning. These can combine, producing for example monist eternalism or dualist nihilism.

  • Dualist eternalism regarding the self/other boundary insists that you do have a self that is durable, separate, continuous, well-defined. Different versions assert conflicting claims about “what the self really is.” Or, they say, you should have a particular kind of self, so if you don’t, you need to fix that.
  • Monist eternalism says that really there is no boundary between self and other; so if it seems like there is, you need to fix that.
  • Nihilism says there is no self at all; the concept is meaningless, so if you think you have a self, you need to fix that.

These combine in extra-confused ways. Some people claim that your self really doesn’t exist, and it is bad, so you need to get rid of it. Some claim that you have a hidden True Self, and it is the same thing as having no self. Some claim this True Self is The Entire Universe.

All such confusions come from the assumption that “the self” must live in something like a house, with solid walls that stay put and keep hailstorms outside and your pet aardvarks inside. Crazy ideologies begin when insightful people notice the self/other relationship not working like that, but lack a framework for understanding nebulous boundaries.

Nebulous selfness

Recognizing that the “boundary” between self and other is both patterned (non-arbitrary, partly predictable, somewhat reliable) and nebulous (ill-defined, unstable, purpose-dependent) dissolves all the confused stances. I call this complete stanceintermittently continuing.” Here, “self” is not a thing; it’s nebulous patterns of interaction. It is sometimes useful to say “selfness” or “selfing” to underline the non-object-ness.

Having abandoned the confused stances, there’s much to say about selfness in the complete stance. And this is all fascinating and often useful. But it’s important not to overvalue the details (so I will reluctantly limit my discussion). There’s more value simply in dissolving self as a problem. Once you firmly set aside the confusions, what remains doesn’t require a lot of fussing over.

For the complete stance, meaningness lies in dynamics: patterns of interaction. To understand any particular dynamic, you have to look at aspects of both “self” and “other,” and also the “boundary” between them. (I’ve put scare quotes around all these to underline their nebulosity and non-object-ness.) Typically, most of “the self” and “the world” are irrelevant to a dynamic, so they are the wrong conceptual categories.

Aardvarks

Aadorable aardvarks (CC) Scotto Bear

Let me make a ridiculous analogy. You notice that your house is increasingly inhabited by tarantulas, which you fail to fully appreciate due to arachnophobia. You could declare them illusions and ignore them (no-self nihilism); that would work until you wake up with a pair engaged in amorous activities on your face. You could tear down all the walls (monism) because you and tarantulas and aardvarks are All One. However, you’d still have tarantulas, plus hailstorms, and the aardvarks might bolt. You could caulk all the tiny holes around the windows to keep tarantulas out (dualism)—but we’ll see that won’t help unless you nail the front door shut too. (Then you’d starve.) You might decide that your house is the wrong kind (the kind that tarantulas infest) and move into a different one—but it turns out that won’t work either. There’s nothing wrong with your house (self).

On investigation, you discover that your daughter has been bringing home a tarantula every day to feed to the aardvarks; but they don’t like tarantulas, and ignore them, so the would-be meals wander off to inhabit your dress shoes and silverware drawer.

The problem is not with the house, nor with the world outside the house. The problem is an activity that actively transports creatures across the boundary. Discussion with your daughter reveals that her biology teacher has told her that aardvarks eat bugs, and the biggest bugs she could find were tarantulas, so she thought your pets would especially enjoy them. A misconception easily corrected; problem solved.1

Meaningness is like this, I will suggest. It is neither objective nor subjective: neither outside the self, nor inside. Rather, meanings are patterns of activity that cross the nebulous self/other boundary.

Nebulosity of self makes complete control impossible

“Intermittently continuing” is unsettling because it undercuts fantasies of control. It contradicts the ideal of a unitary subject with free will, because activity is always a dynamic, improvised collaboration with nebulous-but-patterned otherness.

(What I say here about control is condensed and may not make sense yet. I’ll explain more later in this chapter; the upcoming chapters on capability and contingency discuss nebulosity of control in depth.)

Any causal analysis of activity has to trace high-frequency loops of mutual influence that cross the self/other boundary. We cannot make independent choices because the permeability of that boundary—via perception and action—means we are never independent. It is futile to try to force interactions to conform to a preconceived idea of how they should go.

We cannot even control ourselves, because phenomena switch frequently from “self” to “other” and back; because “parts of self” have nebulous boundaries themselves; and because they are often more closely coupled to “other” than to other parts of self. As a dramatic example, when two people fall in love against their better judgement, each person’s emotions communicate more with the other’s than with their own more dispassionate thoughts.

Allowing nebulosity of selfness enables accurate relationships

Intermittently continuing means learning to be comfortable with the ambiguity and unpredictable changeability of selfness. That requires attention, courage, hard work, and good humor. However, it frees you from neurotic self-obsession, and increases the effectiveness and enjoyability of your relationships.

Supple, skillful selfing makes for satisfying, successful interactions. Firm and fluid othering enables us to play with the self/other boundary—whose interpenetrating nebulosity and pattern become a source of amusement. We can co-construct our lives as art projects in the shared space of meaningness, not inside or outside, but between and surrounding and pervading us.

  • 1. Did you know that the only thing aardvarks eat besides ants and termites are aardvark cucumbers, which fruit underground? For desert-living aardvarks, these cucumbers are a vital water source. Conversely, aardvark cucumbers are entirely dependent on aardvarks for reproduction. Nothing else eats them to disperse the seeds.

Schematic overview: self

Stance The authentic, true, deep self Selflessness Intermittently continuing
Summary The hidden, true self is directly connected to the Cosmic Plan, bypassing social constrictions There is, or should be, no self Selfness comes and goes; it varies over time and has no essential nature
What it denies Nebulosity of self Patterns of self; the self/other boundary; natural self-interest
What it fixates The patterns of selfness; the self/other boundary Discontinuity; absence of self/other boundary
The sales pitch Your true self is much more exciting than your yucky regular one You can get rid of your yucky regular self The patterned self is unproblematic once its nebulosity is accepted
Emotional appeal I’m much better than I thought I was I have nothing to lose
Pattern of thinking Romantic idolization of fantasy self Willful blindness to continuity and self-interest Humorous affection for one’s foibles; absence of anxiety
Likely next stances Eternalism, monism, specialness Nihilism, ordinariness Nobility, enjoyable usefulness
Accomplishment Authenticity in sense of living from true self instead of regular self Egolessness Conjuring supple, playful magic in the shared self/other space
How it causes suffering Attempts to retrieve supposed true self fail; attempts to live up to it fail Neglecting practical personal affairs
Obstacles to maintaining the stance Non-existence of true self Manifestations of regular self Fear of discontinuity; cannot repair or remove self
Antidotes; counter-thoughts No essential nature, no coherent true self I have much in common with who I was and will be
Intelligent aspect Recognizes negative social conditioning & possibility of spontaneity Recognizes lack of essential nature or durable continuity
Positive appropriation after resolution Points toward power of nobility: we can be much more than we generally pretend Points toward generosity of nobility

A billion tiny spooks

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This page will discuss the representational theory of mind. This disastrously mistaken theory is accepted by most cognitive scientists. Consequently, it has become highly influential in general Western culture, and is taken for granted by most educated Westerners. It has significantly distorted our understanding of our selves, and so of how to live.

The theory originates in the analytic philosophy of of mind. (“Originates” both historically and logically.) Post–1950 philosophy of mind has two aims:

  1. To develop a convincing argument for physicalism—the doctrine that mental things are actually physical things, or are “reducible” to physical things.
  2. To acknowledge and include cognitivism—the doctrine that people have beliefs, desires, and intentions (not merely dispositions and behaviors).

Physicalism is opposed mainly to mind-body dualism: belief in a non-physical soul. The natural human view (of pre-modern people) is that the mind is not a physical thing. It is the “ghost in the machine”: a “spook.” The dualist view is that spooks are the sort of thing that can think; can have beliefs, desires, and intentions. A person is a spook plus a meat robot. Meat can’t think.

So the “cognitive project” has been to explain how meat can think. That requires exorcising the spook—the ghost in the machine. The representational theory of mind is the dominant approach.

Simplifying somewhat, it says that beliefs, desires, and intentions are “represented” as sentences in a special language (“mentalese”). Mentalese, in turn, is “implemented” as physical things (structures, states, or processes) in the brain.

Beliefs, desires, and intentions are about things outside the brain. For example, the belief that “snow is white” is about snow.

The question is: what does “about” mean? And how can things in the brain be about things outside the brain? What sort of relationship is this “aboutness”?

No good answers to these questions have been found. Worse, there are good in-principle reasons to think that no answers can be found:

If beliefs, desires, and intentions were mental representations, then they would have to be non-physical. That is: spooky.

These are the “billion tiny spooks” of my title. The representational theory of mind beheads one big spook (the soul); but—like the Hydra—it simply returns as innumerable smaller ones.

(Bizarrely, mentalist philosophers often slip, and admit this in passing, describing representations as “non-physical”—despite their stated commitment to physicalism.)

The upshot is that either physicalism is wrong, or else the representational theory is wrong. Or both! I don’t have a strong opinion about physicalism; my guess is that something like it is probably right, although it seems wrong as stated. Anyway, mind-body dualism is almost certainly wrong, so a non-spooky understanding of what it is to be human should be helpful.

The representational theory is also clearly wrong, for several reasons in addition to its logical contradictions. Overall, the problem is not that meat is the wrong thing to make beliefs, desires, and intentions from. It is that things inside the head cannot magically connect to things outside the head to be about them. (This discussion in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is relevant, but may be opaque if you’re not familiar with the literature.)

The representational theory is not only wrong; it is also harmful for ordinary people’s understanding of what we are and how to live. I’ll also explain these malign consequences.

Fortunately, there are alternative approaches to understanding what sort of things people are, which are more consistent with facts, and which lead to better ways to live. These approaches do not take the skull as a fixed boundary; their understandings span “inside” and “outside.” Their explanations involve interactional dynamics of physical causality that—through perception and action—constantly cross between “self” and “other.”

The true self

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Notions of “true” self are closely related to eternalism, because they fixate pattern and deny the nebulosity of the self.

There are both dualist and monist concepts of true self. The dualist true self is a “soul” or isolated subject. The monist true self is magically connected to, or identified with, the eternal ordering principle.

Selflessness

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This will discuss several stances that deny the self, in different ways. Some interpretations of the Buddhist doctrine of anatman are nihilist in denying that the self exists at all. Some materialist views are also nihilistic denials. And then there are religious or ethical views of “selflessness” that hold that the self is existent but ought not to be, or ought to be ignored or undermined or subjugated or denied or generally kicked around.

Intermittently continuing

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An optimistic view of the self as incoherent, but not non-existent, and not necessarily problematic.

Neither objective nor subjective

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How can meaningness be neither objective nor subjective? Doesn’t everything have to be one or the other? Either meanings are out there in the world, and properly objective, or inside you, and merely subjective or mental. Right?

As we've seen earlier in this chapter, the inside/outside, self/other distinction is nebulous, and often irrelevant, because meaning keeps crossing it. Meaningness couldn't be either subjective or objective, because it extends freely between, across, and around self and other.

Not objective

It's been obvious for more than a century that the universe is not inherently meaningful (eternalism). However, it's also not inherently meaningless (nihilism). It's neither inherently meaningful nor inherently meaningless because meaning is not the sort of thing that can be inherent.

Meaningness is an interactional dynamic that arises between oneself and one's situation. The problem comes when we deny our part in that, and try to put all the responsibility for meaningfulness out in the situation. We want to do that because we don't trust ourselves. We don't think the meanings we co-create will be good enough. We want a solid, definite, separate, permanent, inherently existing meaning to be made available. (This is what people invent God for—to feed us that kind of meaning.) That kind of meaning would be reassuring and dependable.

However, there isn't any meaning like that. The only kind that exists is nebulous: ambiguous, fluctuating, uncertain; like a dance, not like a statue. That might seem unsatisfactory at first. However, once you accept that meaning is like that, you can see that it's actually much better than the hypothetical solid kind of meaning. It provides freedom and creativity and exploration and lightness, where the given-by-God kind of meaning would be restrictive, dull, heavy, boring, and inescapable. If the universe had inherent meaning we would all be living in a totalitarian prison.

Not subjective

If meaningness were merely subjective, or if it were a matter of individual or social choice, it would not be possible to be mistaken about it. Yet we make mistakes about meaningness all the time.

This was the point of my casino story. I was mistaken not about what happened, factually, but about what it meant. You can't say that “the universe loves me" was "true for me". It was just plain false.

Meaningness in the complete stance

Meaning is a collaborative, improvised accomplishment. We re-make meaning in every moment, through concrete, situated meaning-making work.

Even the most simple, mundane meanings (like the meaning of breakfast) are interactional—they involve you, your yogurt and jam, the spoon and table, the people you are eating breakfast with, and (to decreasing extents) everyone involved in creating that situation, and all the non-human actors who were also involved. The more of that stuff you remove, the less meaning is there.

Purpose

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This chapter discusses stances toward purpose.

For an introduction to this topic, see "An appetizer: purpose."

The question of purpose is easy for both eternalism and nihilism. For a committed eternalist, your purpose is whatever the Cosmic Plan says it is; no problem. For a committed nihilist, there can be no purpose; no problem. Both stances are difficult to live up to. In practice, we usually fall into two other, confused stances: mission and materialism.

These confused stances share an underlying mistaken metaphysical assumption: that purposes can be classified as "mundane" or "eternal," and only one sort is valuable. Mundane purposes are those we share with other monkeys: food, security, reproduction, and position in social dominance hierarchies. Eternal purposes are those that transcend animal existence, such as creative production, disinterested altruism, and religious salvation. These also get called "higher" or "transcendent."

Materialism is the stance that only mundane purposes count; it fixates their value, and denies eternal purposes. Mission is its mirror image: it fixates eternal purposes and denies mundane ones.

So, mission is the stance of “the transcendently valuable role given to me by God,” and materialism is the stance of “getting as much for myself as I can.”

Mission often additionally claims that each person has a unique eternal purpose; so it is mutually supportive with the stance of specialness. Materialism is concerned with purposes everyone shares; so it mutually supportive with ordinariness.

Both mission and materialism can be seen as muddled middles that try, and fail, to reconcile eternalism and nihilism. Additionally, there is a muddled middle that, recognizing the failures of both mission and materialism, tries to find a further halfway point between them. It mingles materialism with mission, attempting to satisfy the demands of both in a single course of action. You might, for instance, pursue fame and glory leading a celebrity media campaign to save starving Africans from poverty. Motivations are usually mixed. When pursuing eternal purposes, one almost always also hopes for some mundane reward.

The complete stance for purpose, enjoyable usefulness, rejects the mundane/eternal dichotomy. The value of both sorts of purposes is nebulous but patterned. This complete stance replaces the misleading question “what am I supposed to do” with “what can I do now to be useful and enjoy myself?”

Schematic overview: purpose

Stance Mission Materialism Enjoyable usefulness
Summary Only eternal purposes are meaningful Only mundane purposes are meaningful All purposes are meaningful, when they are. Do things that are useful and enjoyable.
What it denies Value of mundane purposes Value of eternal purposes
What it fixates Value of eternal purposes Value of mundane purposes
The sales pitch Find and follow your true mission, and the universe resonates with you He who dies with the most toys, wins There is no scoreboard
Emotional appeal Exciting, personal, transcendent purpose lifts you out of mundanity Get what you want
Pattern of thinking Fantasy; non-ordinary methods for seeking the supposed true mission Grim self-interest Flow
Likely next stances Eternalism; specialness, true self Nihilism; ordinariness Nobility, intermittently continuing
Accomplishment Sacrifice all mundane purposes to eternal mission (saintliness) Exclusive self-interest Rennaisance person
How it causes suffering Can never find your supposed true mission; neglect mundane aspects of life Can never get enough; alienation from others and from authentic creativity
Obstacles to maintaining the stance Reasonable self-interest Compassion, creativity Is that it? No hope of completing purpose, so no hope for salvation or basis for self-congratulation
Antidotes; counter-thoughts Mundane purposes matter to me I do care about others, and about creative work
Intelligent aspect Eternal purposes are valid; materialism is unsatisfying Mundane purposes are valid; mission is a fantasy
Positive appropriation after resolution Creativity and generosity are aspects of enjoyable usefulness Material satisfaction and accomplishment are aspects of enjoyable usefulness

Mission

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Mission: the confused stance that only eternal purposes are meaningful, and we each have a unique role to play in life.

For an introduction to this topic, see “An appetizer: purpose,” and “Purpose,” above.

Materialism

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This section will discuss materialism, in the sense of Madonna’s “I’m a material girl”: the stance that the only meaningful purposes are mundane, self-interested ones.

For an introduction to this topic, see “An appetizer: purpose”—the first page in this book!—and the chapter introduction, “Purpose.”

Mission and materialism mingled

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The defects of materialism and mission are well-known and experienced by us all. Because each is unworkable, we adopt both at different times, or in different parts of our lives.

A more sophisticated strategy is mingled materialism and mission. This is a muddled middle: an attempt to compromise that fails because it does not fully correct the metaphysical error underlying these two confused stances.

In this mingling, you try to satisfy the demands of both in a single course of action. You might, for instance, pursue fame and glory leading a celebrity media campaign to save starving Africans from poverty. Motivations are rarely unmixed. When pursuing eternal purposes, we almost always hope for some mundane reward.

This confused stance preserves the self-indulgent, self-protective grasping of materialism, and the self-righteous justification of mission. There is a cost to this. The mingled stance tends to lose the uncomplicated enjoyment-value of animal satisfaction (because we pretend that is not what we seek), and also the selfless compassionate joy of accomplishing eternal purposes (because we have subordinated those to a materialist agenda).

Enjoyable usefulness

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Enjoyable usefulness is the stance that both eternal and mundane purposes are meaningful—when they are. Therefore, we can and should pursue both.

On the other hand, no purpose is ultimately meaningful. That gives us freedom to choose; and means that we need not particularly fear failure.

This stance tends to lead to experiences of “flow” and enjoyable accomplishment.

On the other hand, it is unattractive because accomplishment gives no metaphysical validation. There is no basis for hope of salvation if only we try hard enough.

Personal value

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You can read a summary of this topic on my Approaching Aro site. This site will treat the same material in greater depth.

Schematic overview: value

Stance Specialness Ordinariness Nobility
Summary I have a distinct and superior value given by the eternal ordering principle My value comes from being like everyone else Developing all my abilities in order to serve others
What it denies Shared humanity Unusualness
What it fixates Personal value Personal value
The sales pitch You are better than they are Don’t put on airs Be all you can be
Emotional appeal Reinforces ego No need to live up to potential
Pattern of thinking Disdain; self-aggrandisement Fearfulness, laziness Impeccability
Likely next stances Mission, true self Materialism Enjoyable usefulness
Accomplishment Autoapotheosis Baaaaaa Heroism
How it causes suffering Ego-trips; role anxiety; need for constant confirmation Suppression of individuality
Obstacles to maintaining the stance Familiarity of experience; maintaining image is exhausting Unusual impulses; cannot conform to herd Selfishness; fear; laziness
Antidotes; counter-thoughts Recognition of shared humanity Recognition of potential and uniqueness
Intelligent aspect Recognition of potential and uniqueness Recognition of shared humanity
Positive appropriation after resolution Nobility does rise above the ordinary Humility is an aspect of nobility

Specialness

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You can read a summary of this topic on my Approaching Aro site. This site will treat the same material in greater depth.

Ordinariness

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You can read a summary of this topic on my Approaching Aro site. This site will treat the same material in greater depth.

Nobility

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You can read a summary of this topic on my Approaching Aro site. This site will treat the same material in greater depth.

Capability

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Schematic overview: capability

Stance Total responsibility Victim-think Light-heartedness
Summary We each create our own reality and are responsible for everything that happens in it It’s not my fault and I am too weak to deal with it Playfully co-create reality in collaboration with each other and the world
What it denies Contingency, limits Responsibility, capability, freedom
What it fixates Responsibility Overwhelming power of circumstances
The sales pitch Perfect circumstances can be achieved with sufficient effort You are oppressed and therefore blameless
Emotional appeal Fantasy of control over future No need to make any effort No need for self-criticism or for anxiety
Pattern of thinking Aggressive, paranoid Fearful, depressed, emotionally manipulative Effortless accomplishment
Likely next stances Specialness, true self, mission Ordinariness, materialism Nobility, ethical responsiveness
Accomplishment King of the Universe Have all needs met by exploiting others’ pity Effortless creativity
How it causes suffering Hypervigilance; can’t meet infinite requirements with finite capacity Resentment, depression, neglect of opportunities
Obstacles to maintaining the stance Obviousness of limits Obviousness of opportunities Hard to let go of need to be reassured about outcomes
Antidotes; counter-thoughts Letting go of fantasies of accomplishment; willingness to fail Gratitude; letting go of payoffs; walking away; practical action
Intelligent aspect Recognition of possibility Recognition of limits
Positive appropriation after resolution Experience depends more on our own perception & action than is usually thought Because we have finite capabilities, we can cut ourselves some slack

Total responsibility

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The delusion that you are, or can be, totally responsible for “your” reality is prevalent in some religious and psychotherapeutic circles.

Victim-think

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Victim-think is a strategy for denying all responsibility. “Since I have no power, it’s not my fault, and you can’t expect me to deal with it.”

Victim-think is versatile; you can deploy it in many ways, varying across several axes. It applies to individuals and to social groups. It can be first person (I or we are victims), or third person (he/she/they are victims). You can use it as an excuse for bad behavior, or as a plea for aid. Those can be directed at powerful people or institutions, or at God or some other eternal ordering principle.

Some common patterns of use:

  • Maybe I did steal that, but I am having a hard time. It’s society’s fault.
  • My social group is victimized, so we are justified in attacking members of another one.
  • I know this relationship is bad for both of us, but I’m too weak to end it.
  • That social group is oppressed, so the authorities should give them special privileges.
  • That guy is a member of an oppressed group, so you can’t hold him responsible for his criminal act.

Each of these may be accurate in rare cases. More often, they are harmful distortions, and covert power-plays.

Generally, it’s rare for anyone to bear no responsibility for their actions—just as total responsibility is rare or impossible. These extreme, confused stances are attractive because they simplify moral reasoning, and can be used as weapons in social conflicts.

Mostly, everyone involved has partial control over events, which makes questions of moral responsibility complex and inherently nebulous. We may not like that, but any serious ethics or politics has to acknowledge and work with reality as it is, not as we would like it to be.

Light-heartedness

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Playfully co-create reality in collaboration with each other and the world.

Ethics: a new beginning

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[This chapter is mainly unwritten. In the mean time, I've written about ethics in a Buddhist framework on another site. The approach I take there is mainly consistent with what I will eventually write here. This page there sketches the path to a complete stance for ethics. This one fills in some more details, although in retrospect I find it unnecessarily obscure.]

Available systems of ethics are dysfunctional. They ignore nearly all the ethical questions people actually have. Academic and theological answers are useless, not because they are wrong, but because they address questions no one cares about.

Our most pressing ethical questions—such as “how ethical should I be?”—cannot even be asked within existing systems, much less answered correctly. And so, in practice, everyone has abandoned the systems.

Unconstrained by systems, ethical claims have proliferated as metastatic cancers of meaning, infiltrating tumors into every organ of culture.

Useful analysis has to start over—but not from scratch. We all do ask the questions that matter, and not all our answers are wrong. Everyday ethical experience goes most of the way toward an accurate ethical analysis.

The structure of this chapter should be familiar by now: it looks at an opposing pair of confused stances that share a mistaken metaphysical assumption; diagnoses the mistake as a failure to appreciate the nebulosity of the topic (ethics); and develops the complete stance that recognizes the inseparability of the nebulosity and pattern of the topic.

The underlying mistaken metaphysical assumption is that, to be meaningful, ethics must have a definite, objective foundation.

Ethical eternalism assumes there must be a correct ethical system that accurately reflects the objective reality. (This is a classic example of wistful certainty: there must be one, otherwise the universe would be bad and wrong, and that’s unthinkable.)

One main reason for clinging to eternalism in general is the fear that without an eternal ordering principle, ethics is impossible. It is thought that ethics must be based in a transcendent source such as God or Rationality or Progress. Fortunately, that is not the case. Ethics arises, reliably, from the patterned interaction of innumerable factors. It does not require a definite foundation.

All existing eternalistic ethical theories are not merely wrong, they’re entirely irrelevant to the issues we actually care about. The ones they obsess over (deontology vs. consequentialism, trolley problems, what Jesus would have said) no one cares about. Those are quite unlike the ethical questions we typically encounter.

Ethical nihilism recognizes (accurately) that ethics has no ultimate foundation, but then concludes that ethics is merely subjective and/or meaningless. This is wrong; it seems plausible only if one fails to challenge the underlying metaphysical assumption about the nature of ethics.

Ethical responsiveness rejects the assumption and so can develop an accurate ethical practice.

Since this three-fold pattern of analysis is now familiar, I can dispose of ethical eternalism and ethical nihilism reasonably quickly.

Most of the chapter is devoted to an exploration of everyday ethical practice. Ethics is not a system of reasons (as in consequentialism and deontology), nor of personal traits (as in virtue ethics). It is patterns of situated social practice. “Situated” means that it is unboundedly dependent on context. “Social practice” means that it is inherently collaborative, improvisational, and interpretive.

I discuss numerous ethical phenomena that everyone encounters regularly, that we actually care about, and that are mostly or entirely ignored by existing ethical theories. I’ll address these both from an informal, participant-observer point of view, and based on recent research in evolutionary psychology and sociology. Along the way, I gradually introduce my normative judgements, pointing toward “responsiveness.”

How ethical should I be?

This question comes up several times a day for most people, I believe. There is no existing ethical framework in which it can even be asked, much less answered. I think that’s a serious problem. People are disappointed by ethics and religion because they don’t get an answer, and that has negative consequences.

I use the question to introduce the flavor of my approach. It’s also a “forcing question”: trying to answer it uncovers a series of related issues in everyday ethical practice, which might otherwise be overlooked.

My first answer is that we should all be much less ethical. This answer is somewhat flip, and I’ll take it through a series of qualifications, modifications, and reverses. However, it’s also quite serious. The absence of a workable ethical framework leads us to devote great effort to applying ethics in domains where it’s the wrong tool. We should all stop doing that.

Ethical nebulosity, ethical anxiety, and ethical ease

[We cannot be certain about ethics because the topic is inherently nebulous. This leads to ethical anxiety. Ethical anxiety motivates much dysfunction, at both personal and whole-society levels. It is mainly unnecessary, however. Accepting the interplay of nebulosity and pattern dissolves most of it.]

Ethical value and ethical metastasis

[There are many forms of value: pragmatic value, aesthetic value, religious value, and ethical value among them. Over the past century, pluralism and relativism have eroded all types of value other than pragmatic and ethical. This leads to mis-using ethics as a stand-in for other non-pragmatic forms of value, notably sacredness. This ethical metastasis is hugely harmful. (I will analyze many specific cases.) I advocate de-ethicizing various domains and restoring them to their proper value-types.]

Ethical display, ethical fungibility, and values marketing

[Ethical display is communicating your ethical position. I'm using the word "display" in the ethnomethodological sense; it's closely related to "signaling" in evolutionary psychology and economics. (I've written at length about ethical signaling elsewhere.)]

[Ethical fungibility is the idea that you can be less ethical in one situation if you've been more ethical than required in another. (Or, if you want to be less ethical now, you can promise to yourself that you'll make it up later.) There's an implicit sense of "karmic bank account" involved. We all do this, although it leads us to do wrong things. It makes intuitive sense due to the absence of a coherent approach to the question "how ethical should I be?".]

[Values marketing exploits ethical fungibility by adding small amounts of "ethics" to products in order to justify a much higher price tag. "Fair trade" coffee is the canonical example. People buy it to alleviate ethical anxiety and to build up their ethical bank balance. Starbucks is in the business of selling indulgences, in the Pre-Reformation sense!]

Ethical agreement

[Most supposed ethical disagreements are not genuinely about ethics, but about other value-types, or are display strategies. In fact, nearly everyone in modern societies agrees about nearly everything. Recognizing this alleviates ethical anxiety and promotes ethical freedom.]

Ethical freedom

[Here I discuss freedom from ethics. Often choice of action is not an ethical issue: you can do what you want. Ethical considerations are often not overriding (even where they apply at all). This is tremendously important, because creativity and enjoyment live in the zone between "must" and "must not."]

Ethical responsiveness: the complete stance

[Treating ethics as a situated social practice, we can ask: what tools and skills are available? How can we do this better?]

Schematic overview: ethics

Stance Ethical eternalism Ethical nihilism Ethical responsiveness
Summary The Cosmic Plan dictates a fixed ethical code according to which we ought to live Ethics is a meaningless human invention and has no real claim on us Ethics is centrally important to humans, and is not a matter of choice, but is fluid and has no definite source
What it denies Ambiguity of ethics; freedom; courage; creativity Ethical imperativeness
What it fixates Ethical code (rules/laws) Absence of ethical absolutes
The sales pitch Cosmic justice guarantees reward/punishment if you obey/defy the ethical code Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law Ethical anxiety is unnecessary
Emotional appeal Avoiding blame; preventing others from harming/offending you Take what you want; don’t let morality get in the way
Pattern of thinking Self-righteousness Arrogance Light-hearted concern
Likely next stances Religiosity, mission Secularism, materialism Light-heartedness, nobility
Accomplishment Remorseless soldier of God Sociopathy Ethical maturity
How it causes suffering Harmful actions are sometimes required by the supposed rules; beneficial ones may not be promoted Without ethics, harmful actions are just rational self-interest
Obstacles to maintaining the stance Situations in which ethical rules are unclear or promote obvious harm Natural concern for others Requires close attention to particulars; no guarantee of blamelessness
Antidotes; counter-thoughts Allowing ethical ambiguity Respecting ethical imperatives
Intelligent aspect Recognizes the importance of ethics Recognizes the ambiguity of ethics
Positive appropriation after resolution Points toward nobility Points toward ethical maturity

Ethical eternalism

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There must be a correct ethical system that reliably determines right and wrong. Adopting it will guarantee we will always do and be good, not evil.

This is the founding assumption of ethical eternalism. It’s pure wishful thinking—wistful certainty. There’s no reason to believe such a system exists; in any case, we certainly haven’t found it, after millennia of trying. So don’t hold your breath waiting for it before making ethical decisions.

Religious ethical systems can be maintained only through faith, in the face of contradictions—increasingly unattractive.

The ethical systems promoted by academic philosophers are equally implausible, even if they are supported by reams of complicated arguments. Bizarrely, advocates of each agree it has profound flaws they have no idea how to fix, and yet… since there must be a right system, their arguments boil down to “our fundamental flaws look less bad than yours.”

  • “Consequentialism is at least coherent, even if it gives obviously wrong answers most of the time”
  • “Deontology at least gives right answers in typical situations”
  • “Virtue ethics at least doesn’t insist that you do obviously wrong things, like the other two do”

Since there are well-known, excellent refutations for each eternalist ethical system, this page doesn’t need to go into much detail.

Rather, it will simply point out that eternalist ethics is bound to fail, because ethical issues are inherently nebulous. Worse than just being wrong, eternalism provides unbounded certainty for ethical opinions, which leads to extremism, and catastrophic atrocities committed on the basis of moral absolutism.

Ethical nihilism

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Ethical nihilism is the stance that ethical claims are all entirely meaningless.

This is wildly implausible, and probably no one can really adopt it, even if some gloomy philosophers claim to be committed to it. So this page can be blessedly brief.

Ethical responsiveness

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Authority

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Schematic overview: authority

Stance Reasonable respectability Romantic rebellion Freedom
Summary Contribute to social order by conforming to traditions Make an artistic statement by defying authority Value social order as a resource; satirize it as an impediment
What it denies Nebulosity of social order Value of social order
What it fixates Social order Heroic status of the counter-culture
The sales pitch Law’n’order Death to the oppressors!
Emotional appeal It’s safe It’s sexy
Pattern of thinking Emotional constriction Confused romantic passion, testosterone poisoning Political maturity
Likely next stances Ordinariness; dualism Specialness; mission; nihilistic rage; true self Nobility, light-heartedness, kadag
Accomplishment Pillar of society Romantic martyrdom
How it causes suffering Complicity in oppression; abandoning of responsibility and moral maturity Opposes realistic action to ameliorate conditions; justifies violence
Obstacles to maintaining the stance Social conventions stifle expression and opportunity Silly; doomed by definition Urgency of social imperatives
Antidotes; counter-thoughts Who cares what they think? I’m being silly and just striking a pose to look cool
Intelligent aspect Recognizes value of social order Recognizes arbitrary and restrictive character of social order
Positive appropriation after resolution Points toward kingly qualities of nobility; society as a beneficial structure Points toward warrior qualities of nobility; charismatically involving; makes splendid art

Reasonable respectability

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Romantic rebellion

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I have a fair amount of text completed, but not a clean version yet. The following is from the 2007 draft of Meaningness. It draws heavily on Camus’ The Rebel.

Romantic rebellion starts from denying the “omnibenevolent” clause in Problem of Evil. Since there is undeserved suffering, the Cosmic Plan is not good after all. Therefore the eternal ordering principle must be defied. (This can apply to any source of order seen as corrupt, including God, Fate, The Establishment, “the artistic mainstream,” “oppressors,” or whatever.)

The first problem with romantic rebellion is that it is necessarily doomed, because it doesn’t actually deny the eternal principle, it merely defies it. The Authority remains omnipotent, or at any rate vastly more powerful than the rebel. So the enterprise is obviously hopeless from the start.

As a result, there is a certain lack of seriousness about the whole business. The rebel wants to convince himself that he’s extremely committed and that defying God is massively courageous, but it’s all quite silly. “Dream the impossible dream” & tilt after windmills. It’s about glory, not practical consequences. Romantic rebellion is romantic because it is based in passion, not reason.

Recognizing this impracticality, the rebel must denigrate the possibility that things can actually be changed for the better. The rebel sees ordinary, pragmatic benevolence or reform as the enemy, because it draws attention away from the necessity of rejecting the existing order in toto. The rebel “can only exist by defiance”.1 Any sort of moderation is also the enemy, because again it implies a degree of acceptance of what is. Total destruction is (in theory) the aim. Typically, the logic of romantic rebellion makes any actual destruction unnecessary, but there is always a danger that moral confusion plus romantic logic will lead to acts of terrorism. Mass murder on the scale of saturation bombing and concentration camps is not romantic, but suicide bombing—and destroying people’s careers using social media—can be.

On the other hand, actual retaliation from The Authority seems unlikely. (If genuine defense against The Authority becomes necessary, rebellion ceases to be romantic and becomes unpleasantly practical.)

The second problem is that romantic rebellion does not identify an alternative coherent source of value. (If you set up such a source, you’d have a new, different eternalism; a different move.) Lacking such a source, romantic rebellion somewhat arbitrarily extols some of what was previously seen as good as evil, and vice versa. The two are blended. Extolling “the outlaw, the criminal with a heart of gold, and the kind brigand.”2 “The romantic hero, therefore, considers himself compelled to do evil by his nostalgia for an impracticable good.”3

In the Rudra move, one takes oneself to be the source of value. But the romantic rebel does not have the guts to do that, or has enough sense not to.

The romantic rebel actually recognizes his or her own confusion about values, and this is a source of suffering. This is a specifically romantic suffering that the rebel celebrates. It is a badge of honor.

Since there is no realistic hope or method for overthrowing The Authority, there is nothing practical for the rebel to do. What is left is to maintain an attitude of opposition. Quietly maintaining an attitude by oneself is not very exciting, however; and romantic rebellion is all about faux heroism.

Romantic rebellion is, therefore, necessarily a social activity. What is important is not simply to maintain an attitude, but to strike an attractive pose. One must be seen to be maintaining an attitude.

To be seen as a rebel, one must join in a Movement that forms the audience for one’s heroic pose. Further, one looks to The Movement for confirmation of one’s uncertain value judgements.

Within The Movement, the important thing is looking cool—since actually warring against God is hopeless, and actually doing anything useful undercuts the total rejection of the existing state of affairs. The actual source of value is personal glory. This entails playing to an audience; “always compelled to astonish”.4

Romantic rebellion doesn’t work as theology (though people have tried; Satanism, for instance).

Romantic rebellion also makes for lousy politics. Striking defiant poses is not a workable basis for government—although it is the main activity of most contemporary politicians. Not to mention Islamist terrorists.

Romantic rebellion is a lot of fun, though, and can have terrific aesthetic value throughout the arts. E.g., rock’n’roll is all about romantic rebellion.

Sympathy For The Devil. Paradise Lost.

  • 1. Camus, p. 47.
  • 2. Camus, p. 46.
  • 3. Camus, p. 44.
  • 4. Camus, p. 48.

Freedom

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Value social order as a resource; satirize it as an impediment.

Sacredness

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Schematic overview: sacredness

Stance Religiosity Secularism Kadag
Summary The sacred and the profane are clearly distinct in the Cosmic Plan Sacredness is mere superstition; nothing is sacred Because nothing is inherently sacred, everything can be sacred
What it denies Nebulosity of sacredness; vastness Sacredness; vastness
What it fixates The sacred Arbitrariness of perception of sacredness
The sales pitch Avoid contamination through ritual purity Freed from religion, we can get on with practical projects The good bits of religion without the dogma
Emotional appeal Personal superiority through religious conformity; minimize uncanniness of vastness by codifying it Don’t have to think about that uncomfortable religion stuff; pretend you don’t see vastness and hope it goes away Can neither dismiss nor grab onto sacredness
Pattern of thinking Self-righteousness Pretending not to care about meaning; apathy Awe
Likely next stances Reasonable respectability, mission, specialness Materialism, ordinariness Freedom
Accomplishment Perfect ritual purity Total inability to experience awe Ability to experience anything as sacred
How it causes suffering Paranoia about contamination; resources and opportunities wasted; tribalist vilification Flatness of existence in the absence of the sacred
Obstacles to maintaining the stance Obvious mundanity of religious forms Spontaneous religious feelings Innate reactions of disgust
Antidotes; counter-thoughts Purity is a matter of perception, not truth I do sometimes experience awe
Intelligent aspect Recognition of sacredness Recognition that nothing is inherently sacred
Positive appropriation after resolution Sacredness matters Narrow religion is harmful; something better is available

Religiosity

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Religiosity is the confused, eternalistic view that the sacred and profane can be clearly separated.

Secularism

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As used here, secularism is the stance that sacredness is mere superstition; nothing is sacred.

Kadag

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Because nothing is inherently sacred, everything can be sacred.

I have written a page on a closely related topic on Approaching Aro.

Contingency

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Schematic overview: contingency

Stance Causality Chaos Flow
Summary Everything happens for the best, in accord with the Cosmic Plan. (Except free will lets us do evil.) The universe is random; nothing happens for any particular reason There are no ultimate causes, and causation is nebulous, but we naturally observe patterns
What it denies Pointless suffering Interpretability
What it fixates Reasons [Nothing]
The sales pitch There is no need to suffer, so long as you conform to the Cosmic Plan [This is a hard sell ] God is dead. Dance with reality
Emotional appeal Can pretend there is no pointless suffering [This may be only a theoretical possibility]
Pattern of thinking Kitsch Despair Realism
Likely next stances Eternalism, religiosity Nihilism, secularism
Accomplishment Pollyanna, Candide La Nausé (Sartre) Maximal ability to influence events, without attachment to outcome
How it causes suffering Denying pointless suffering makes it hard to alleviate [Theoretically, inability to take practical action]
Obstacles to maintaining the stance Obviousness of pointless suffering (our own and others’) Obviousness of causality No guarantees
Antidotes; counter-thoughts Lots of stuff just happens [Probably not necessary]
Intelligent aspect Things often do make sense Things often are inherently uninterpretable
Positive appropriation after resolution Points toward pragmatic competence Points toward comfort with uncertainty

Causality

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Chaos

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Flow

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There are no ultimate causes, and causation is nebulous, but we naturally observe patterns.

Meaningness and Time: past, present, future

Western culture, society, and selves have disintegrated.

The bottom has fallen out of the bucket.

This is common knowledge. It is just a fact—for worse and for better. It happened. Spilt milk. No use wringing hands.

Instead, ask: now what?

The problems of meaningness we face now are dramatically different from those of a half-century ago. We also sense new opportunities, and have new resources.

To relate better with meaningness in the future, it helps to understand how meaningness works now. To understand that, it helps to understand how it worked differently in the past.

So, Meaningness and Time begins with a history. It describes a chronological series of modes of relating with meaningness. I concentrate on the history of the past few decades—the period that some theorists call “postmodern.”

Modernity can be seen as a few centuries of trying to make eternalism into a systematic organizing principle for culture, society, and self. This began to seem dubious a century ago, and the twentieth century was haunted by the specter of nihilism. That was the great twentieth century problem of meaningness.

Late in the century, many people concluded that systematic eternalism had finally collapsed. Yet the nihilist apocalypse failed to arrive—at least not in the form feared. (Too much meaning is now a huge problem; absence of all meaning is not.) So then what, if neither eternalism nor nihilism?

The past half century has brought a succession of approaches to answering that, which I call the countercultural, subcultural, and atomized modes. Each has responded to a crisis of meaning created by the previous mode, and each has produced new serious problems.

That brings us to the present—the atomized mode of tiny jagged shards of meaning-stuff: globalized, commodified, decontextualized; a kaleidoscopic, hypnotizing, senseless spectacle. (Twitter, in other words.)

We cannot go back; each former mode was superseded because it did conclusively fail to provide what we needed from meaning. How can we go forward?

I sense, tentatively, a new mode emerging, which I’ll call fluidity. Perhaps, if I am right that there even is such a thing, it will manifest dire new problems of its own.

I’m hopeful, though, that it’s workable in ways that other recent modes were not. It approximates the complete stance, just as modernity approximated eternalism and postmodernity approximates nihilism. If the complete stance is accurate and functional, then the fluid mode should be too.

How meaning fell apart

Girl exploring modern ruins at Gunkanjima Island
Image courtesy Jordy Meow

My suggestions for how meaningness may evolve in the near future, and how best to relate to it, are based on an understanding of changes in recent history. I propose a series of modes of relating to meaningness that have developed over the past few decades. Each mode solves particular problems of meaningness caused by the previous mode; but introduces new problems of its own.

This page introduces the modes; chapters within this history explain the modes and their implications in detail.

A very brief history of meaningness

The choiceless mode is unaware that alternative meanings are possible. This is the mode of closed cultures; of societies isolated from other peoples. It has not existed in the West for several centuries, and is increasingly rare world-wide.

The problem: When cultures come into contact, they experience conflicts over meanings. Other peoples do things differently; their beliefs seem obviously wrong to us. But they think our beliefs and practices are wrong. How do we know ours are right?

The solution: The systematic mode tries to solve this problem by creating unarguable foundations, to restore certainty. This mode is closely allied with eternalism, although not all eternalism is systematic. The systematic mode is universalist; it says that meanings are the same for everyone, everywhere, eternally.

The new problem: During the twentieth century, it became apparent that attempts to build unshakable foundations had failed, and suspicion grew that it was actually impossible. That raised the threat of nihilism: perhaps everything is actually meaningless?

By the 1960s, mainstream systematic society and culture had become obviously dysfunctional. They failed to provide adequate meaningfulness, and there was general revulsion at the mainstream’s nihilistic moral breakdown.

The new solution: The countercultural mode developed in response. It came in two flavors, the monist counterculture (the hippie movement) and the dualist counterculture (the Moral Majority). These movements proposed universalist systems of meaning that were alternatives to the mainstream. Although rhetorically opposed, the two countercultures were structurally similar, shared historical roots, and had more in common than is usually recognized.

The next problem: The universalism of the countercultures was a fatal flaw. Their new visions were both unable to appeal to a majority. They were unable to encompass the diversity of views on meaningness now found within societies (and across the world). Because they were mass movements, they could not provide community.

The next solution: The subcultural mode abandoned universalism, and with it the attempt to find ultimate foundations for meaning. Instead, subcultures provided numerous “neotribal” systems of meaning that were meant to appeal only to small communities of like-minded people. Some subcultures explicitly extolled nihilism.

The problem with that: Subcultures proved unable to provide either the breadth or depth of meaning people need. Also, lacking strong organizing principles, they repeatedly fissioned in response to differences in view. This is most obvious in the case of subcultures centered on musical genres. The Wikipedia article on heavy metal subgenres is worth a look. Heavy metal is a subgenre of rock, the primary countercultural genre, and spawned a subculture. Death metal is a subsubgenre. Melodic death and technical death are subsubsubgenres.

Around the end of the millennium, subcultures reached the limit of fragmentation, and the mode became unworkable. You can try to live the melodic death lifestyle, but it’s not going to answer most of your questions about Life, The Universe, And Everything. The attempt to provide coherent meanings without foundations had failed. Meaning disintegrated altogether.

What came next: The atomized mode takes incoherence for granted. It does not seem a problem, in this mode; we don’t need systems. Meanings do not hang together. They are delivered as bite-sized morsels in a jumbled stream, like sushi flowing past on a conveyer belt, or brilliant shards of colored glass in a kaleidoscope. Or—to use the thing itself as a metaphor for itself—like Twitter.

The problems we have now: Throughout the twentieth century, from the beginning of the breakdown of the mainstream systems until the breakdown of subcultures, the underlying worry was “not enough meaning.” The atomized mode delivers, for the first time, way too much meaning. It is overwhelming, like trying to drink from a firehose.

Because the shards of meaning do not relate with each other, it’s impossible to compare them. There is no standard of value, so everything seems equally trivial. The collapse of subcultural community has atomized society, and we find it impossible to construct satisfactory selves from the jagged fragments of meaning we’re bombarded with.

Now what: A new fluid mode may address our current problems of meaningness. My understanding of fluidity is tentative; it’s based partly on observation of current trends, and partly on the intrinsic logic of meaningness.

The fluid mode approximates the complete stance, which incorporates the accurate insights of eternalism and nihilism: recognizing that meaningness is always both patterned and nebulous. Likewise, the fluid mode acknowledges structures of meaning without attempting rigid foundations. Its values are collaboration, creativity, improvisation, intimacy, transience, aesthetics, and spiritual depth through community ritual.

The fluid mode goes meta to the process that generated the previous modes. It understands how each solved serious problems of meaningness. It’s therefore able to use each of those solutions when similar problems arise.

Periods, people, cultures, and categories

The various modes appeared at different times; but none of them entirely displaced previous ones. Each arose among some leading-edge group, spread as its solutions became widely understood, and diminished gradually as its own problems became obvious and the next mode mostly replaced it.

Anyone living in the West now can relate to meaningness in any of the modes, and sometimes does. However, which mode seems most natural, and which mode one uses most often, varies from person to person.

It seems that the way one relates to meaningness is learned when one is roughly 15–25 years old; and for most people it is difficult to change after that. The mode that feels native is likely the one prevalent in your peer group at that age. Newer modes seem unattractive and unnatural. Their problems are more obvious than the opportunities they offer. For example, many in the Baby Boom generation remain loyal to their counterculture, even though they have participated in subcultures, and experience atomization when they use the internet.

People have different preferences in relating to change. Some would rather be at the hip leading edge, and are likely to adopt the modes typical of younger generations; some prefer the safety of the trailing edge.

Nations and cultures, too, vary in the speed at which they adopt new modes of meaningness. The Islamic world, for instance, has only partly transitioned from the choiceless to the systematic mode, and is mostly unable to cope yet with the following ones. Some poor countries are being forced by the internet from the choiceless world directly into the atomized one; that’s extremely difficult.

Since none of the modes is fully functional, none constitutes straightforward progress. I’m sympathetic to the conservative impulse to resist these changes and stick with a mode that seems to mostly work. Later in this section, I’ll write about the risks and costs of too-fast change. However, I believe the only way out is through. And, I hope that the fluid mode will be able to incorporate the valuable aspects of all the others.

You may be skeptical of my “modes” as categories; you may find them simplistic, and counterexamples may come to mind. If so, you are quite right. They are meant as “ideal types”: heuristic conceptual categories that illuminate some trends, while inevitably distorting others. They are not meant as ontological; they have no existence in the real world.

In fact, after finishing this history, I will demolish it. The whole thing is a lie. There are no modes; we are always “in the fluid mode” because meaningness has always been both patterned and nebulous. No culture or society was ever actually systematic, for the same reason no one can actually be an eternalist: nebulosity is always obvious. No culture or society can actually be atomized, for the same reason no one can actually be a nihilist: patterns are always obvious.

The analysis of modes is useful for the same reason as the analysis of confused stances. Though we are, in some sense, always in the complete stance, and always in the fluid mode, we try to imagine otherwise. That can have catastrophic consequences.

Sources and similar analyses

Most of this history may be familiar; I may have nothing original to say. I’ve drawn on at least five sources:

  • The standard historical analysis of modernity, nihilism, and postmodernity
  • The sociology of American generational attitudes
  • My personal experience living through most of the modes
  • Adult developmental psychology
  • Vajrayana Buddhist theory

My explanations of the choiceless (“traditional”) and systematic (“modern”) modes, the threat of nihilism, the rise of the monist counterculture, and the end of modernity are all standard intellectual history. “Postmodernity”—a historical concept that is now widely accepted—corresponds to the subcultural and atomized modes.

I began thinking about the history of meaningness when trying to understand why Buddhism appeals much more to Western Baby Boomers than to younger people. The answers I wrote in 2009 and in 2011 were early versions of the history I’m presenting here.

I discovered that there is as much of a generation gap between Buddhists of Generation X and Generation Y as between the Boomers and Gen X. That lead me to read about generational differences, which helped me understand that “postmodernity” includes two quite different modes (subcultural and atomized), which are native for Generations X and Y respectively.

I seemed to have as much in common with Gen Y as with Gen X. (Probably that is because I am a perpetual adolescent and refuse to grow up. I’ve never owned a house, married, had children, or—arguably—ever had a “real” job.)

Affinity with Gen Y made me realize that I could understand cultural, social, and psychological change through my own experience and memories. I’ve lived through most of the history I describe. Each successive mode has radically changed the way I’ve lived, and the way I experience my self. I grew up in a museum of mainstream systematic culture; tried to be a hippie in my early twenties (though it was too late); enthusiastically participated in numerous subcultures through the ’80s and ’90s; experienced the dissolution of subculturalism, found myself atomized by the internet; and am now groping for fluidity.

Reflecting on the changes in my experience of meaningness led to the problem/solution framework I present here. Its details may be original. However, it’s structurally similar to theories of adult psychological development such as that of Robert Kegan, in The Evolving Self, which influenced me heavily in my twenties. Kegan’s framework concerns “meaning-making,” and suggests that each developmental stage solves problems created by the previous one.

Spiral Dynamics extrapolates such theories from psychological to cultural development. Roughly, its beige, purple, and red memes correspond to the choiceless mode; blue and orange to the systematic mode; green to the monist counterculture; and yellow to the fluid mode. It doesn’t seem to include anything corresponding to the countercultural/subcultural/atomized distinctions (just as the theory of postmodernity does not).

In Kegan’s framework, and in Spiral Dynamics, each developmental stage goes meta to the last, so that whatever was previously experienced as “subject” becomes “object,” and a new subject, or self, emerges to reflect on it. Also, the stages alternate between excesses of individuation and social embeddedness. I love the elegance of this structure, but it mostly doesn’t fit the changes I’m writing about. Instead, I see each mode as containing the seeds of its own destruction, because its supposed solution becomes the next problem.

The final influence on my story is the Vajrayana Buddhist theory of form, emptiness, and non-duality; or eternalism, nihilism, and Dzogchen (the Tibetan word for “completion”). The Vajrayana understanding of “nihilism” is close to the Western one, and “eternalism” is analogous to Western understandings of foundationalism, which is the philosophical basis for the systematic mode. Vajrayana’s analysis of the failures of both nihilism and eternalism echoes that of current Western philosophy; but it claims also to provide a solution that avoids the problems of both by incorporating the insights of both. That was the starting point for Meaningness, this book. The central claim of the book is that complete stances can resolve the problems of the confused stances. Similarly, I hope that the fluid mode can resolve the problems of postmodernity.

Incorporating this Vajrayana view points toward a possible solution—fluidity—whose details might not be predictable in other frameworks.

A gigantic chart that explains absolutely everything

This chart is an overview of Meaningness and Time: the past, present, and future of culture, society, and our selves. It shows how the modes of meaningness manifest in many aspects of life.

Some people find this sort of systematic presentation helpful; others do not. Skip it if you are one of those who don’t.

It probably won’t fit in your browser window, and you’ll have to scroll horizontally. Sorry about that. (The title of this page mocks its unwieldiness and ambition.)

Mode Choiceless Successful systems Systems in crisis Countercultures Subcultures Atomization Fluidity
Era (all dates approximate and are for leading-edge societies) Over by 1700 1450-1914 1914-1980; native for those born before WWII 1964-1990; native for Baby Boom generation 1975-2001; native for Generation X 2001-?; native for Millennials Hypothetical present or near future
Problems this mode addresses, created by the previous one [None] Challenge of alternatives. How do we know our way is right and all others are wrong? Failure of all foundations. Nihilism: meaninglessness, materialism, disenchantment of the world Failure of mainstream culture, society, and self to provide meaning; disgust at hypocrisy, business-as-usual, and moral breakdown Countercultures deny diversity, are revealed as idealistically impractical, fail to find new foundations; mass movement cannot provide community Subculture does not provide adequate breadth or depth of meaning; exploitation/parasitism relationship with mass-scale culture and society Overwhelming ocean of meaning; triviality (distraction from value judgement); perceived tensions between internet and “real life”; collapsing legacy systematic-mode institutions
Attempted solution [None needed] Supposed foundations for certainty: scripture, rationality, science, personal or collective revelation. Rational, universal, coherent Totalitarianism (attempt to force systems to work); existentialism (attempt to create personal meaning out of nothing) Alternatives (monist and dualist). Universalist (supposed to be right for everyone). Explicitly anti-nihilist. Draws heavily on 1800s Romanticism; abandons rationality Subcultures provide diverse bodies of meaning, without attempting foundations. Exclusivity limits group size to provide community. Abandons universality Global consumer culture provides conveniently-packaged morsels of meaning to cover all eventualities. Abandons coherence Watercraft on the sea of meanings. Meta-systematic, complete stance: reinstates rationality, universality, coherence, but recognizes their nebulosity
Culture Incoherent traditions, accepted without question Attempts to formalize/ rationalize/ systematize culture. Classicism followed by Romanticism. Development of avant-garde; beginning of the “culture war” Development of new cultures as self-conscious, positive mass alternative. Collapse of high culture/pop culture distinction Repeated fissioning of subcultures. Genre obsession. Hipsterism. Quest for “authenticity.” Postmodernism. Universal soup of tiny culture-bits. Kaleidoscopic, hypnotic, senseless reconfiguration. Groundless creative production; awareness of the intertwining of nebulosity and pattern; synergistic remix. Collaborative, improvised, intimate
Society Unquestioned, simple social structure Complex, rationalized social structure; bureaucracy Social structures increasingly diverse and problematic; competing political theories; world wars and clash of civilizations Brotherhood of all counterculture participants Subcultural tribalism: communities based on narrow but innovative shared values/interests. Rituals replace belief systems. Global society moves into interactive media; virtual communities; social networks enable larger, geographically dispersed communities Transitory organizations spontaneously assemble within a durable social infrastructure matrix. Ongoing meta-systematic re-negotiation of individual/subsociety/superstructure interfaces
Self Person fixed by unquestioned social role; no awareness of inside/outside distinction Self as unitary, rational individual, with an “inner life,” and an explicitly-defined relationship with society Age of anxiety: growing awareness of internal incoherence. Self defined by membership in one counterculture (and rejection of the other counterculture) Identity derives from subcultural allegiance. Integration of personality a receding ideal. Atomization of self due to always-on internet: massively more interruptions, entertainments, relationships, tasks Self explicitly accepted as fluid, nebulous assembly, inherently in dynamic interaction, with transient characteristics but no essential nature
Music Traditional forms; community production; no sense of authorship Self-conscious art music (“classical” in the broad sense). Cult of the composer Crisis in classical music; nihilistic atonality. Serialism. Jazz. Everyone in Boomer generation listens to all countercultural music, regardless of genre. In dualist counterculture, attempts at Christian alternative Punk as first mass subculture. Not intended as a universal alternative; explicitly nihilistic. Repeated fragmentation of genres into sub-sub-genres. Ludicrousness of genre leads to mash-ups. Run-DMC/Aerosmith “Walk this way” video collaboration as early explicit example. Genre as musical element, like melody and rhythm, to use and play with. Democratization of music production and distribution as computer tools (DAWs, Soundcloud) improve.
Sex and gender Unquestioned sex roles Sex roles reinforced by systematic ideologies First wave feminism Second-wave feminism in the monist counterculture. Moral Majority & “family values” in dualist counterculture Fragmentation of feminism: pro- vs. anti-sex, egalitarian vs. essentialist. LGBTQ, Quiverfull, men's movements, orthosexuality, Bears, PUA, NoFap, Rules Girls, furverts, … Intersectionalism. Jagged, incoherent, decontextualized political and ethical claims about sex and gender that have escaped from subcultures Whole-hearted ironism; recognition that there is no fair system and conflict is inevitable; passion & compassion together
Buddhism Miscellaneous practical superstitions; karma, merit, and auspiciousness; monastic economics. Entirely unknown to Consensus Buddhists. Scriptural Buddhist theorizing Buddhist modernism: importation of new, rationalizing foundations from West, as a response to cultural breakdown in Asia Consensus Buddhism: hybrid of Asian Buddhist modernism with American monist counterculture Diverse Western Buddhist subcultures, mainly developed by charismatic Asian modernizers. No serious attempt at universality. Spurious rhetoric of traditionalism (usually actually Asian nationalism). McMahan: “Global folk Buddhism.” Dharma burgers. Vapid @DalaiLama tweets. Fake Buddha quotes. McMindfulness. Eckhart Tolle. SBNR. Buddhism as amorphous assemblage of means for transformation of culture, society, and self by uniting spaciousness and passion to unclog energy and empower nobility
Vampires Considered a realistic physical danger Symbolize incoherence as challenge to the system (Church, Nation, and/or rationality) [Bram Stoker’s Dracula] Monstrous Other as Romantic anti-hero [Ann Rice; Dark Shadows] Monstrous Self as Romantic anti-hero [Laurel K. Hamilton's Anita Blake books] Monstrosity (incoherence) of the self as a practical hassle that can be managed [Kim Harrison] Trivialization of no-longer-threatening incoherence [Twilight as first attempt]. But fails until we have fully digested shadow Nobility of vampires as creative, benevolent appropriation of personal incoherence
Food Mythological food taboos; pre-systematic practices of hunting, gathering, growing, harvesting, cooking, sharing, and eating it Mainstream state/academic/industrial food ideologies: Domestic Science, Home Economics, Nutrition On-going; the mainstream is still strong in this domain, oddly enough Hippie health-food culture; macrobiotics; vegetarianism Subcultural food ideologies: proliferation of variants of vegetarianism (vegan, fruitarian, etc); Slow Food; locavorism; raw foodism; paleo; etc. Commercial diet fads; magic ingredient of the week; proliferation of decontextualized health/nutrion claims in food marketing; soylents ??? [Current paucity of knowledge makes future inconceivable]

In praise of choicelessness

Tantric Buddhist dancer

Tantric Buddhist religious dance image courtesy Steve Evans

The choiceless mode of relating to meaningness has no “becauses.” In the systematic mode, when you ask “why,” a system answers “because…”. The “becauses” hang together in ways that make everything make sense. In the choiceless, or pre-systematic mode, that’s not necessary—or even conceivable.

In the choiceless mode, you know of only one way of understanding meaningness. You are unaware of any alternatives. In fact, you are also unaware of your own understanding; of the possibility of alternatives; and of your lack of awareness.

In a choiceless culture, no one asks “why?” about meanings, and so there is no “because” needed to answer. Asking doesn’t occur to you. Meaning is a given: inherent in people and things. Water rats are tasty; there’s no point asking why. You marry your mother’s brother’s daughter; to marry your father’s brother’s daughter would be an abomination; you do not think to ask why.

In a choiceless society, you are defined by your social position. You are the son of so-and-so, and belong to the eagle clan—as your father, the clan chief, did. When he died, your elder brother wore the eagle clan hat at the wake. If your brother dies before you, you will wear the clan hat. Like all eagles, you are an enemy of the horse clan and allied to the bear clan. You knew from the age of five that you would marry your mother’s brother’s daughter. This is your self; this is who you are.

In a choiceless culture, art follows forms handed down through legitimate peripheral participation plus some oral explanation. The forms are unquestioned; they are simply as they are. Making art (in the broad sense—music, stories, clothing) is a communal activity. There is no sense of authorship, or originality as a value.

All of this is just how it is; there is no “because” available.

Of course, pesky children and anthropologists do ask “why?”. If they are persistent, they’ll get some story that makes no sense. Answers in choiceless societies follow dream logic, not pragmatic logic. Typically they involve biologically-impossible sex acts, a flying buffalo-woman, or a talking snake in a magic fruit tree.

In choiceless cultures, meaningness is not a problem. You may have a problem, because you loathe the cousin you have to marry, but that’s just practical. It’s a fact you have to live with, like the permanent limp you got with an ankle broken when you were a kid. It does not occur to you to blame the system, because you have no concept of systems.

Meaning in choiceless societies seems timeless and changeless. Particular meanings can and do change, but within the culture this is noticed only as specific, local, contingent changes, rather than as a general dynamic. There is little sense of history; of change beyond that experienced during one’s life, and in one’s community.

Many social scientists use the word “traditional” to mean what I’m calling “choiceless.” However, “traditional” is also used to mean entirely other things,1 so I’ve invented the new term to avoid ambiguity.

A partial experience of choicelessness

Himalayan Tantric Buddhist temple

Image of Tantric Buddhist temple courtesy Michael Reeve

The choiceless mode is the most natural one. Nearly all humans who have ever lived have only experienced meaning in the choiceless mode. Our brains co-evolved with choicelessness, and it feels right. All the other modes feel wrong. So Meaningness and Time is about why the other modes—despite all their genuine benefits—make us unhappy, and what to do about that.

Unfortunately, the choiceless mode depends on ignorance of alternatives. It’s usually impossible for nearly everyone in the developed world, and survives mostly only in remote areas in the most “backward” countries.

In 2003, I spent a month on pilgrimage in the Himalayan backcountry; one of the poorest and most remote places in the world. I went to practice my religion, Tantric Buddhism, with people for whom it is the normal way of life. In that, I was naive and mainly disappointed. As with notional Buddhists everywhere in Asia, few people were aware of even the most basic Buddhist doctrines or practices, and almost no one had Buddhist motivations.2

Yet my month there was probably the happiest of my life. What I found instead was a sane, optimistic, decent society, that felt right to me, and I believe also to most people in it. Presumably part of that rightness was religious commonality. A Catholic might feel something similar on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. I don’t think that commonality was the main thing, though.

I would like to believe that Buddhism is a particularly good religion, and this was a good place with good people partly due to its Buddhist history—even if there is not much Buddhism now. At the time, I wrote:

Whatever their experience of religion, it seems to have a very salutary effect on their character. It has been remarked by visitors here for hundreds of years that they are exceptionally honest, hard-working, considerate, sensible, polite, reserved, hospitable and decent; it is hard to resist summing this up as “noble.”

I think, though, that the quasi-Buddhist content of the culture may have been less important than that it was a rare survival of the choiceless mode. The people had an intact social order, with ritual roles that everyone understood thoroughly and accepted without question.

Yesterday I took part in a procession (splendid costumes, trumpets and cymbals, deity and sword dance, fire offering) in which lots of old people were counting Guru Rinpoche mantra. So I pulled out my rosary and practiced mantra too. This got lots of amused looks (politely hidden, except in the case of small children). Norbu said today that he had overheard conversation and in fact everyone was excited and happy to see a white Buddhist; they had never seen one before. Maybe I should practice in public more often.

My own experience was one of choicelessness, too, or as much as I’ve ever had. At a literal, practical level, there were almost no decisions I could make. I knew only a few dozen words of the language, so I was dependent on the translator and organizer of the pilgrimage. Experientially, I was wide-open due to the combination of culture shock and intensive meditation practice:

Sometimes I find myself in an a situation that is clearly not me, with no explanation for how this could have happened, producing a sense of surreal dislocation. For example, a month ago I found myself working as an unpaid waiter in the restaurant attached to a Hindu temple in Malaysia, due presumably to some causal chain that I could not begin to reconstruct. My ability to laugh and ecstatically go with such situations (“I’ve no clue why how or why am I here, nor do I have the foggiest idea how to be a waiter in general, much less in a Malaysian Hindu temple restaurant, but I will do the absolute best job I can and enjoy it thoroughly, because why not”) seems to be the best measure of my health at the level of energy.

Here the most important religious practice in an individual’s life is the Annual Ritual. This is a house-and-family-blessing ritual. A crew of monks are hired to provide the requisite clangs, blaats, and hocus-pocus3 in the house’s shrine room (every house has one). While they are in there performing the ritual, the head of household participates in a small way. Mostly, however, the Annual Ritual is an excuse to invite all your friends and extended family over for some serious drinking (in the rest of the house). Exactly how this can be the most important religious practice in an individual’s life, I don’t understand, since the practice seems to be done by the monks almost exclusively. This is part of the general paradox that everyday life here is thoroughly infused with religious practice, and yet in a sense they don’t seem to practice at all. (They pay monks to do it for them.)

Anyway, yesterday I found myself inexplicably in the shrine room of a house undergoing Annual Ritual, helping the monks. Mostly they knew the liturgy by heart, which I didn’t, and there was no spare copy of the text, and in any case I can’t read Tibetan fast enough to keep up. So my participation was mostly restricted to throwing rice at appropriate moments, and joining in on the very occasional bits of liturgy I recognized (such as Guru Rinpoche mantra).

At the end of the pilgrimage, I concluded:

I’ve gained significant new insight into what makes me happy and miserable; and, relatedly, into the nature of my energy problem. Briefly, in managing a business, I learned to divide my energy finely, and to send out the fragments of my being to animate all the minute details of a complex enterprise—leaving as little as I possibly could within my own body. Over the years this became a habit, and one that has been difficult to unlearn. Here, I have been entirely cut off from “the world” and its complexities, into which I would habitually discharge my energy. I have instead been surrounded by natural beauty and by the sacred. Practicing perception and nowness, together with some specific energy methods, has drawn my energy back into my body, coherent and undivided. The challenge now will be to make that habitual even when dancing in the charnel ground that is the Western world.

  • 1. In postmodernity, conservatives often use “traditional” to mean “modern,” i.e. the way things were until forty years ago. “Traditional” can also mean no more than “we did it that way last time.” As we’ll see, traditions are often back-dated by their inventors, to make them seem non-choices.
  • 2. Instead, they practiced “the worldly yana,” a religion of practical benefits.
  • 3. Clangs from cymbals, blaats from trumpets, and hocus pocus from religious texts read out loud.

The glory of systems

The Crystal Palace, 1851

The Crystal Palace, a triumphant showcase of systematicity, built 1851

The rise and fall of “because”

Western culture, society, and selves all fell apart forty years ago. Or so say many theorists; and I agree. To understand how we relate to meaning now, and how we could better relate in the future, we need to understand that recent past.

A systematic culture answers “why” questions with “becauses.” The answers are reasonably consistent and coherent. A series of “why” questions eventually reaches an ultimate, eternal Truth. This Truth is the foundation of the system, which supposedly answers all questions for everyone, everywhere, eternally.

Religious systems, government systems, economic systems, aesthetic systems, philosophical systems, scientific systems, family systems: until a few decades ago, these provided iron frameworks for meaning. Meanings were held safely in place, certified by reliable structures.

This was an extraordinary accomplishment. Systems are not normal or natural. Almost no one has had them in the hundreds of thousands of years humans have been around. Nearly everyone has had to make do without becauses. Human progress over the past few centuries can be attributed almost entirely to systems.

Then, “because” stopped working. We are back in a becauseless world—like and unlike that of our pre-systematic ancestors.

We have not yet figured out how to live well without becauses. Suggestions about how to do that are the goal of Meaningness and Time. First, though, I will explain how “because” worked, how it stopped working, and where that leaves us.

Disclaimers

  1. The history of the rise and fall of “because” is extremely interesting. However, it’s a standard academic topic that I have nothing new to say about. (My tale begins in the aftermath.) So this page presents just a brief summary, for readers who are unfamiliar with the backstory.
  2. The question of how systems arose, and how (and whether) they failed, is one of the most important and most debated among historians. A careful account, with caveats and footnotes, would be much longer. My version may be a “Just So Story,” or fanciful fable. I find it illuminates recent events, but you have every right to be skeptical.
  3. Historians often use the word “modern” to mean what I’m calling “systematic.” The “modern era” covers roughly the late 1400s until the late 1900s. However, “modern” has other meanings.1 To avoid confusion, I’ve chosen a non-standard word.

Why systematicity happens

A society builds a systematic culture when it becomes aware of alternatives. When your tribe meets another that thinks it’s not OK to marry cousins, like you do, the natural thing to do is to kill and eat those barbarians. In rare cases, this is impractical, and you are stuck with talking to them. They criticize your marriage system, which you didn’t even know you had, and theirs is horrifying. (Or dangerously appealing, if you don’t like the cousin you have to marry.) So now you need to come up with a justification, and stories about talking snakes with magic apples no longer cut it.

The European Renaissance is a key example.2 Global trade gradually made Western Europeans increasingly aware of alternative cultures: Eastern Orthodox Christianity, the Islamic world, and even China. A major push came with a wave of refugees from the Fall of Constantinople (1453), who brought with them the texts of Ancient Greece and Rome (which had been lost in the West), plus the culture of the Byzantine Empire, plus Persian and Arabic scholarship.

Interior of the Crystal Palace with Neoclassical decorations, 1851

Interior of the Crystal Palace with Neoclassical decorations, 1851

Europeans gradually recognized many of these foreign ideas as serious challenges, or even as right. Meaningness became a problem. How to resolve conflicts between meanings?

The Renaissance got a head start by discovering that the Ancient Greek philosophers had asked the same question, and had found plausible answers. The rest is well-known: the Protestant Reformation (which ended choiceless Christianity), the European Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the rise of capitalism, democracy, individual rights, and the general triumphal march of modernity.

Systematic society

Queen Victoria inaugurates the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace, 1851

Queen Victoria inaugurates the Crystal Palace, 1851

A systematic society has a multitude of social roles—unlike a choiceless society, which has only a few.3 Each role is defined by a code of regulations, which are rationally derived from Ultimate Truth. Roles fit together into complex institutions—church, state, corporation, community—that accomplish society’s proper goals. Everything makes sense—everything has a “because”—so everyone knows what they are supposed to do. These systems together provide a stable, harmonious social order. Relationships among people, and between people and God, work as they should. (Or, at any rate, this is the theory.)

Systematicity makes possible the division of labor. This crucial social technology enabled the spectacular economic, artistic, technological, and intellectual advances of the systematic era. Despite all the attractions of the choiceless mode, no one actually wants to return to it if that means giving up the benefits of the systematic one.4

Systematic culture

The Crystal Palace, 1854

The Crystal Palace in 1854

Systematic culture provides the web of “becauses” that hold society and selves together. It explains why the way we do things is the right way.

Systematic culture is rational, in the original sense. “Ratio” is Latin for “reason,” both in the sense of “reasoning”—the thinking process—and “reasons”—meaning justifications. Systematic culture thinks out reasons for everything. Supposedly, these are based on unshakable foundations that can’t be argued against. The culture builds up, from there, a cathedral of consistent and coherent meanings and values, a vaulting architecture of columns and buttresses, beams and arches, principles and proofs; light and airy, yet firm enough to last till Judgement Day.

A systematic culture is reflective. It discusses itself, describes itself, judges itself, rationalizes itself. Systematic knowledge is abstract, explicit, codified, and universal. Whatever is good and true is good and true for all people everywhere, eternally. Systematic culture is learned in schools and from books more than by apprenticeship.

At the height of systematic culture, in the mid–1800s, religion, philosophy, politics, science, and all the arts were in agreement. Philosophy was not separate from theology, and atheism disqualified you as a philosophy professor. Religion was considered rational; it gave justifications consistent with common sense. Political and economic theory mainly justified the existing social order, drawing reasons from both religion and science. Science discovered the Will of God, as manifest in His Creation. Great art was, by definition, morally improving. Art expressed the highest values of the culture; it was pure, inspiring, and uplifting.

Or so went the official story. With hindsight, this may all sound ridiculous, and even repellent. We know that it failed conclusively a hundred years later. And there were, of course, prescient dissenters. But the internal contradictions in the systematic worldview were mainly invisible at the time, and it did work astonishingly well for several centuries.

The Crystal Palace, built in 1851, was a triumphant showcase of systematicity. An engineering and economic marvel, its elegant geometrical design also reflected the classical rationality of the time. At once it reflected the elegant symmetry and simplicity of Greek temples—great expressions of a previous systematic culture—and pointed to a glorious, literally En-lightened and up-lifted future.

The Palace was an enormous building with walls and roofs entirely of glass. Nothing like it had ever been seen. It was made possible by the invention of glass plate casting, just two years earlier, which was much cheaper and produced much higher-quality glass than earlier processes. The glass plates were assembled into modules, held in place with cast-iron beams. Standardization of the modules enabled mass production, a new systematic social technology. From design on paper to opening, it took only eight months to build the Palace, and its cost was a quarter that of a conventional building of the same size.

The Crystal Palace was built to hold The Great Exhibition. That was first World’s Fair: shows of culture and industry, art and commerce, that were major events for the next century. The Great Exhibition included displays of fine art from around the world and through the centuries; a concert hall; exhibits of all manner of manufactured goods such as cameras, jewelry, locks, guns, and musical instruments; cutting-edge technologies like telegraphs and microscopes; and entire working factories, such as a cotton mill that went from the raw material to finished cloth. It was a huge success.

Systematic self

John Calvin

John Calvin: a main contributor to the development of the systematic self

Living in a systematic society requires, and enables, a systematic self—quite different from a choiceless self.5

In the choiceless mode, you are defined by your relationships; mainly family ones. Being a daughter, mother, and cousin determines what you feel and do. The function of your self is balancing your personal impulses with the needs of others, according to those roles. Morality—being a good person—means maintaining harmony by conforming to collective clan decisions. The choiceless self belongs, and is embedded in a web of mutual caring.

This sort of self is incompatible with complex social institutions. Efficient, specialized work gives you obligations to strangers, on the basis of explicit rules, not felt needs. A self devoted to balancing needs based on relationships cannot make sense of systematic society. It can only experience impersonal obligations as unjust demands imposed by the powerful, for the gratification of their own desires, at the expense of everyone else. Such a self must violate these demands frequently, or (if subjugated) will feel constantly resentful.

To create a systematic self, you emerge from embeddedness, as an individual.6 An individual has relationships, where a choiceless self is relationships. For an individual, the obligations of a relationship are determined by impersonal, rational considerations, not by intensity of feelings.

Creating a systematic self involves hardening boundaries, so other people’s emotions don’t flood you and compel your actions. The subject/object boundary encloses a new inner world of private, reflective experience. Relationships themselves are brought inside, as objects you can consider rationally.

Where the choiceless self is a self, the systematic self has a self: it takes itself as an object in its inner world. The systematic self is able to reason about itself, in relation to others, according to roles, and can adjudicate their requirements dispassionately. For the systematic self, ethics—being a good person—means conforming to abstract systems of laws, rules, and institutions. It means conscientiousness: doing what you have explicitly agreed to do, regardless of how you and others feel about that. It means doing what is necessary to maintain the system and uphold its values.

At first this feels unnatural, but since you now have a self, you can act on your self. You become the administrator of your internal world. You can choose among competing desires systematically, instead of according to which yells louder. You can manipulate yourself into better behavior; into conformity with a systematic society. When successful, you reward yourself with self-esteem, which is abstract and purely internal, rather than with impulse-gratification.

All this is far more sophisticated than the choiceless self, whose inner world is just a chaos of emotions, which aren’t even particularly yours, most of the time.

A systematic self has an individual identity, which is not dependent on social roles. “Individual” literally means “not divided.” As chief of your inner world, you run the show. You have freedom of choice, rather than being torn between conflicting impulses and relationships. You experience yourself a single being, the same person in every circumstance, throughout your life.

A systematic self enables authorship, a mode of cultural creativity impossible in the choiceless world. You create as an individual, by manipulating objects in your private internal world, rather than by cooperatively manipulating external objects in the public world. The enormous flowering of culture that started in the Renaissance, and continued through the modern era, depends on such authorship.

Some historians trace the development of the systematic self to the Protestant Reformation, particularly to Calvinism.7 The Calvinist Reformers deliberately created a well-ordered society by disciplining the poor and demanding that even the aristocracy conform to strict religious morality. To make this possible, they developed new technologies of the self.

The Reformers extended to everyone spiritual practices that had been the preserve only of monks. They insisted that everyone examine the contents of their souls, and that everyone should discipline themselves based on what they found there. No longer could you be saved by passively attending church on Sunday. Every layman had to be his own confessor. Individual identity developed from this individual responsibility for salvation. The new, highly-regulated social order and the new, highly-regulated self were mutually supportive.

Eternalism simulates choicelessness

Systematicity is unnatural—and feels unnatural. Humans evolved in choiceless societies for hundreds of thousands of years. Systematicity began only a few thousand years ago, and it’s mostly only been significant for the past few hundred. Our brains are not adapted for it.8

Eternalism tries to provide some of the comforts of the choiceless mode, within the systematic mode. Eternalism substitutes certainty for choicelessness. If we could be truly certain, we would not have the burden of choice. If everything about culture and social roles were definitely right, we could go back to taking it for granted, without having to reflect on it.

The choiceless mode feels timeless, because you have no awareness of historical change. Eternalism substitutes universality for timelessness; it insists that what is true, is true eternally. But can you believe that?

Unfortunately, certainty is a poor substitute for choicelessness. Certainty implies at least the possibility of doubt. It demands belief. In the choiceless mode, doubt is impossible, because belief is unnecessary. You simply do the things your role calls for.

Also, of course, nebulosity is always obvious, so belief is impossible. The eternalist ploys—pretending, hope, faith, naiveté, and so on—never work for long.

The attraction of most contemporary spiritual systems—from fundamentalist Christianity to SBNR monism—is the implicit promise to return you to the choiceless mode. They lie, though. All they can offer is eternalism, not choicelessness.

  • 1. For instance, in ordinary usage, “modern” often just means “current.” In art criticism, it covers the late 1800s to about 1980—only a small part of the period called “modern” by most historians. That narrower usage of “modern” corresponds to the period of “systems in crisis and breakdown” described next.
  • 2. Systematicity is a matter of degree, not all-or-nothing. The earliest urban societies were already somewhat systematic five thousand years ago. Ancient India, China, Greece, and Rome were quite systematic at their peaks. Rome, especially, was astonishingly modern; it wasn’t until the 1600s, or perhaps even 1700s, that Europe caught up to where it had been a millennium and a half earlier. Rome’s modernity, and its success, was due to its cosmopolitanism: its willingness to adopt and adapt the life-ways of other cultures.
  • 3. On the other hand, in a systematic society, each person has only a handful of roles; whereas in post-systematic societies, we all have so many we can’t keep track of them.
  • 4. When I travelled in Asia, everywhere I went, I asked people “would you rather live here or in Singapore?” Everyone said “I love it here—I would miss the food, my family, the pace of life—but yeah, I’d rather live in Singapore where I could own a big TV.”
  • 5. My explanation here draws on Robert Kegan’s model of psychological development. My “choiceless self” corresponds to his “interpersonal self”, and my “systematic self” to his “institutional self”. These are stages 3 and 4 of his 5-stage schema. “Fluidity” is meant to correspond to his stage 5.
  • 6. According to Kegan, Americans in the 1970s typically created an “institutional self” when they left home for college, full-time work, or the military. Primary membership in an institution outside the family is a natural impetus. I’ve put “created” in the past tense, because—as I will explain in upcoming pages—I suspect it is no longer possible to create a systematic self in the way it was then.
  • 7. For instance Charles Taylor, in A Secular Age. Other systematic societies developed similar self-technologies, presumably for the same reasons.
  • 8. An interesting question is to what extent systematicity and brains have co-evolved recently. The cultural evolution of systematicity may exert strong, novel selective pressures, which may affect genetic evolution of brains. Conversely, as innate brain capacities have changed under this pressure, increasingly sophisticated and effective forms of systematicity may become feasible, driving social and cultural evolution.

Invented traditions and timeworn futures

Cranberry sauce. Yuck!

Most new ideas are wrong. Most new ways of doing things don’t work. Rationality and science can help sort helpful innovations from harmful or useless ones. However, for nearly all the time humans evolved, those were unavailable.

For our ancestors, it was nearly always a good idea to reject any cultural change. Even now, “we have always done it that way” is often a good reason to continue.1 For this reason, our brains tend to conservatism.

For innovators, the popular preference for tradition is an obstacle. A common, effective strategy is to give the impression that the innovation is not new, but traditional. That hides its risks, costs, or defects, and makes it seem comfortingly safe and acceptable. Historians call this ploy “the invention of tradition,” a phrase introduced in an excellent book by that name.

Of course, every tradition was once an invention. That is not “invention of tradition.” “Invention” here means deliberate deception. It is the presentation of something new as though it were ancient. This may involve explicit falsification of history, or just misleading association of the innovation with symbols of tradition.

Genuine, dramatic progress is also attractive, but hard to come by. Advocates of ideas or practices that have long been marginal—because they don’t actually work well—can dress them up as visionary breakthroughs that will revolutionize everything. For a while, this may bring popular attention and acceptance. This is the mirror image of an invented tradition.

So far as I know, historians haven’t discussed this ploy, and there is no standard term for it.2 So, provisionally, I’m calling these “timeworn futures.”

I’ll discuss some entertaining examples of invented traditions and timeworn futures later in this page. (Including horse-drawn carriages, kilts, and cranberry sauce.) But first: how is this relevant to Meaningness?

Legitimizing systems

The invention of tradition (book cover)

Given the serious defects of the systematic mode of understanding meaningness, it is remarkable how successful it was, for how long.

Invented traditions and timeworn futures were key strategies for overcoming psychological resistance to systematicity. For example, the radical new Protestant doctrines were “traditional Christianity, as practiced by the Early Church” (in contrast to the supposed illegitimate innovations of Catholicism). The radical new ethical demands of modern life were “traditional morality.” The radically new bureaucratic state was “the glorious tradition of our nation.” All these descriptions tried to make systematic mode innovations feel choiceless.

Simultaneously, each splinter Protestant sect had a fabulous “new vision” for Godly society; outmoded ethical claims were “spreading rapidly from decent modern people to benighted foreigners and our own lower classes”; and archaic state institutions were “essential foundations for national progress.”

Even after the systematic worldview has collapsed overall, falsifications of both types are still frequently used to justify particular systems.

Invented traditions and timeworn futures are harmful when they justify systems that are worse than alternatives. Arguably, they are benign if they justify systems that are better than alternatives, but which may be rejected for bad reasons. Even then, the deception is dubious.

The countercultures, fabricating pasts and futures

Rave at Stonehenge

Image courtesy Andrew Dunn

As the mainstream collapsed, the 1960s–80s countercultures proposed alternative systems. These soon failed, unsurprisingly, because they didn’t have much new to offer.

Both countercultures relied heavily on invented traditions and timeworn futures. However, the dualist counterculture relied particularly heavily on invented traditions, and the monist one on timeworn futures.

The dualist counterculture advocated “restoring traditional American values,” but the glorious past it extolled had never existed. If the movement had succeeded, it would have created a future unlike anything in history. The monist counterculture proclaimed the “Dawning of the Age of Aquarius,” but this timeworn future was straight out of early–1800s German Romantic Idealism.

Each counterculture used the other strategy as well, though. Reagan proclaimed “morning in America.” The New Age justified epic silliness with invented roots in Ancient Egypt, Atlantis, Native American wisdom, Eastern Religions, Mayan prophesies, or just about any time, place, and culture other than 1800s Europe—because Romantic Idealism was thoroughly discredited.

Buddhism: 2000 years of invented traditions

Reading the history of Buddhism, I gradually realized most of its heroes and events were make-believe. Rin’dzin Pamo recognized The Invention of Tradition would explain the motivations of the inventors, and gave me a copy.

I wrote about a narrow aspect of this back in 2009. A couple years later, I discovered David L. McMahan’s book The Making of Buddhist Modernism, about the invention of “Buddhism” in the late 1800s and early 1900s. I’ve written many blog posts about that, and plan to address Buddhist invented traditions more generally soon.

Meanwhile, the Buddhism invented in the 1970s as a synthesis of vintage–1900 Asian modernist Buddhism with the American monist counterculture is still presented as a cutting-edge new path. Since the weakness and defects of that system have been clear for twenty years, this is a fine example of a timeworn future.

How to defend against ideological time-distortions

The only defense against invented traditions and timeworn futures is to study the history of ideas.

This book is partly an attempt to catalog the building-blocks of meaning and help you recognize them. There are surprisingly few genuinely different ideas about meaningness. Timeworn futures just repackage a few, wrapped in shiny up-to-date branding. Invented traditions try to hide something new amidst the familiar, wrapped in reassuringly retro branding.

The final chapter of The Invention of Tradition is titled “Mass-producing Traditions: 1870–1914.” That, plus discovering that Buddhism-as-we-know-it was invented then, made me realize how much of contemporary ideology dates from the period. The era achieved a brilliant, seemingly harmonious synthesis of Protestantism, scientific rationalism, nationalism, industrial capitalism, and Romantic expressivism. It took extraordinary ideological innovations to paper-over contradictions among these—including extensive time-distortions.

I had neglected Victorian ideology as irrelevant: stiff and dull and forgotten by all. But, the story of meaningness since then is mainly just an account of that architecture disintegrating. To make sense of the wreckage we live among, we have to look at historical images of the palace at its peak.

Forthright mythologization in the fluid mode

It is almost impossible to imagine alternatives to one’s own culture from within. You need to expose yourself to a source of contradiction; of otherness. With the world tending to a global monoculture, pasts are among the few resources we have for innovating futures.

Pasts also have great romantic and aesthetic appeal, so they are effective for communicating and inspiring futures. That is one reason invented traditions work. It is the duplicity of invented traditions that is the main problem, not their creation as such.

I will suggest that non-deceptive creative mythologization, based on an archaeology of meaningness, may be a valuable method in the fluid mode. Myths are sacred fictions we tell about the past to make sense of meaningness in the present, and to point toward futures we hope for (or hope to avoid). Now that we no longer live in the systematic mode, we have no reason to pretend that the myths we make are “true.” We have no compulsion to tell stories that are entirely coherent and well-founded—because we’ve learned that is impossible.

My romantic fantasy novel, set in India in 700, tries to create an inspiring mythology. It mixes genuine history, contemporary values, and—implicitly—ideas about a future I would like to see.

British royal ritual: an invented history, with motivations

Scene from the Coronation of King Edward and Queen Alexandra

The Invention of Tradition analyzes many examples, which are fascinating and often funny. Most in the book concern the falsification of the traditions of the British kingdoms for nationalist purposes. I’ll describe one of these in some depth, and then a variety of other invented traditions briefly.

The picture above is from the Coronation of King Edward and Queen Alexandra, apparently around the year 1275. The style is Pre-Raphaelite, a genre of painting from the mid–1800s that emphasized Romantic fantasy themes. Pre-Raphaelite paintings usually feature gorgeous noblewomen in long flowing pseudo-Medieval robes, gothic architecture, and a wizard or king plus maybe a dragon.3

Britain is, of course, famous for its royal pomp and circumstance; no country does elaborate state occasions better. That is due to its unbroken tradition of royal ritual, going back to Medieval times, as in the picture above.

Not. The Coronation of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra was held in 1902. The “tradition” of British royal ritual had mostly been invented over the previous fifteen years, and the Coronation was mainly new. It was, however, elaborately fake-Medieval. It looked like a Pre-Raphaelite painting—a fantasy of Medieval royal life—because it was imitating a Pre-Raphaelite fantasy.

(The central figure in the background appears to be Merlin, although I suppose he was actually some sort of Anglican Church functionary. Sadly, dragons were already extinct in Britain, so they were not invited.)

Of course, Britain had had genuine royal ritual, presumably for as long as it had had royalty. The point of a coronation ceremony is to get together everyone important to publicly agree that the new king is legitimate and unopposed. This is important because new kings are always opposed, and frequently illegitimate (relative to whatever standard of legitimacy is current). A successful coronation demonstrates that the king has enough power to force everyone to pretend, at least. It sows distrust among the opposition (who have all seen each other giving fealty to the king—so who is to say where anyone’s real loyalty lies?). It also affirms the mutual dependence of the Church and crown, and God’s mandate for rule. If well-executed, coronation works psychological magic (as ritual does), inspiring awe, loyalty, and gratitude in the kingdom’s subjects.

However, for several centuries, Parliament had gradually increased its powers at the expense of kings, with the balance shifting by the late 1600s. Moreover, the British kings from then up to Queen Victoria, who was crowned in 1837, were uniformly defective and unpopular, yet still able to interfere strongly in government.

When Victoria came to the throne, at the age of 18, she was already popular, and a potential threat to Parliamentary power. Parliament therefore engineered a minimal coronation that was both low-key and probably deliberately “shambolic” (as it is often described). This was perhaps the low point of British royal ritual. Nevertheless, Victoria and her husband Prince Albert were popular constitutional monarchs, and exerted considerable political power behind the scenes.

In 1887, Parliament reinvented royal ritual for Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, notionally a celebration of her fiftieth year on the throne. This was royal ritual with an entirely new function. It was not, in reality, to confirm the legitimacy of the Queen. Rather, the Jubilee confirmed the legitimacy of new British establishment: Parliament itself, the Anglican Church, industrial capitalism, and the colonial Empire.

The new establishment’s legitimacy was indeed in question, threatened not by the throne, but by even newer forces. At home, populist movements, including socialism, were rapidly gaining support. Abroad, the moral basis for the Empire, and its political and military feasibility, were increasingly dubious.

The Golden Jubilee, and even more the Diamond Jubilee of 1897, were enormous pageants of made-up ceremony, designed to give the impression that the new British establishment was continuous with ancient tradition. Now the aged, ailing, widowed, withdrawn, depressed and drug-addled Queen could be used as a symbol of that continuity, with no risk of any actual continuity of the throne as a power base. Populists were often republican, in favor of abolishing the royalty and House of Lords. So, the Jubilees were meant to create new popularity for the Queen, and by extension the Lords and the rest of the establishment that she notionally headed. They were highly successful.

The Jubilees were not just—or even mainly—British affairs. The Diamond Jubilee was a lavish “Festival of the British Empire” designed by the Colonial Secretary. Parliament had declared Victoria Empress of India, a newly-invented title, in 1876. That was the pretext for making the Jubilee into a ceremony in which all the colonies gave homage to, in effect, their actual rulers—the British establishment. Ritual festivities were held not only in Britain itself, but throughout the Empire.

Victoria died in 1902, and was succeeded by her son Edward VII—whose Coronation with his wife Queen Alexandra is depicted at the head of this section.4 That grand event was modeled on the Jubilees. Its fake Medievalism suggested eternal stability of British institutions at a time when, in reality, they were changing rapidly.

British royal ritual is now a genuine tradition, having endured for a little more than a century. Here’s a scene from the 2011 wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, featuring the carriage made for Edward VII’s 1902 Coronation.

Royal Carriage at Wedding of Prince William of Wales and Kate Middleton

That carriage was an invented tradition in 1902; the aristocracy had already abandoned carriages for motorcars, so new ones had to be built for the occasion. Pseudo-Medieval carriages are an authentic tradition now. The most recent one features electric windows, heating, hydraulic stabilizers, and built-in digital copies of important British historical documents. Just in case you need to check the Magna Carta, while being dragged along by six horses, to see how your royal powers are constitutionally limited.

In fact, I suspect that the over-the-top Romantic Medievalism of the 1902 Coronation was partly to underline that the royalty were an absurd archaism, retained only for symbolic value—lest the new king get any ideas.

Tartan and kilt

Scottish national dress

A chapter of The Invention of Tradition concerns the invention of Scottish history, culture, and nationality. It was expanded into a a full book, summarized here. Two striking facts concern the invention of the kilt, and of clan tartans, by English businessmen.

Tartan and kilt, those universal badges of Scottishness, are about as authentic as Disneyland. The kilt was invented by an Englishman, Thomas Rawlinson, who came to Scotland in the 1720s to manage an ironworks in the Highlands. Rawlinson observed that while the actual native costume of the Highlanders—a long belted cloak—might have been suitable for rambling over hills and bogs, it was "a cumbrous, inconvenient habit" for men working at a furnace. So he hired the tailor of the local army regiment to make something more "handy and convenient for his workmen" by separating the skirt from the rest and converting into a distinct garment.

Clan tartans were invented in the early 1800s by an English textile manufacturer, William Wilson, as a way of expanding the market for his products. Tartans were already common in Scotland, but variations in pattern were regional. It appears to have been Wilson who had the idea that each clan should have its own pattern.

Royal decree imposed unique tartans on the clans in 1822, when George IV visited Scotland. Sir Walter Scott staged elaborate state pageantry for the king. He invented numerous ancient national traditions for the occasion, deliberately creating the first unified Scottish national identity.

Meanwhile, in America

Thanksgiving is an entirely invented tradition. Its mythology has accreted gradually, but mainly dates to the late 1800s and the first half of the 1900s. One aspect I find particularly amusing:

It has been an unchallengeable American doctrine that cranberry sauce, a pink goo with overtones of sugared tomatoes, is a delectable necessity of the Thanksgiving board and that turkey is inedible without it.
—Alistair Cooke

This is, of course, because it was served at the First Thanksgiving in 1621. No one actually likes the stuff. (We know this, despite claims to the contrary, because no one eats it except at Thanksgiving.5) However, it’s traditional, so one has to pretend.

But actually, there’s no evidence that it was served in 1621. And, the “tradition” was unknown until the 1940s, when it was invented by Ocean Spray, the marketing arm of the cranberry industry. An advertising campaign showed “traditional” Thanksgiving dinners, prominently featuring cranberry sauce. That dramatically increased demand for an agricultural product that is nearly inedible—intensely sour, bitter, fibrous, and otherwise almost tasteless.

And then there’s Christmas.

An ‘American tradition’ is anything that happened to a Baby Boomer twice

“An ‘American tradition’ is anything that happened to a Baby Boomer twice”—xkcd

  • 1. Some readers will balk at this, because it is often also used to justify the unjustifiable. I find Chesterton’s parable of the fence helpful as insight into why maintaining traditions is useful as a default.
  • 2. If you know of a discussion in the academic literature, or an accepted term, I’d love to hear about it.
  • 3. They are ridiculous but I love them.
  • 4. The king doesn’t appear in the picture. It shows the anointing of the queen. “Anointing” means that a shamanic medicine-man smeared sacred gloop on her. Quite what magic that was meant to accomplish, it’s hard to guess. We know, though, that seemingly-senseless rituals of supposedly “primitive” peoples—whether contemporary hunter-gatherers or ancient tribes such as the Victorians—express profound ineffable wisdom, due to their connectedness to the cycles of Nature and openness to the mysteries of Being.
  • 5. My girlfriend claims to like it, and to have eaten it once outside of Thanksgiving. And she is not even American. So, “hardly anyone.”

Systems of meaning all in flames

The Crystal Palace burning down, 1936

The Crystal Palace burning down, 1936

The first half of the twentieth century was awful. Not just materially; Western systems of meaning—social, cultural, and psychological—were falling apart. The glorious accomplishments of the systematic era could not hold civilization together, and seemed likely to be lost entirely in a global conflagration.

Many people even came to think those systems were the cause of all the catastrophes. We who live in the aftermath—we who have never experienced an intact system—we cannot fully appreciate how awful that loss of meaning felt.

This page analyzes the first phase of meaning’s disintegration, roughly 1914–1964. It should help explain the new positive alternatives offered by the countercultures and subcultures, which came next, and also why those failed.

All the events I recount will be familiar, but the way I relate them to my central themes of eternalism and nihilism, and to problems of meaning in the domains of society, culture, and self, may seem novel.

We still have no adequate response to these issues. Any future approach—such as fluidity—must grapple with problems that first became obvious in the early twentieth century.

Society in crisis

Lenin addressing a crowd, 1920

Lenin addressing a crowd, 1920

The period was marked by two social crises: class conflict and world wars. The systematic ideologies that were supposed to resolve these horrible problems seemed, by the end, to have made them worse, or even to have been their principal causes.

Greatly increased division of labor during the 1800s created numerous specialized occupations. This drove great advances in the standard of living and enabled increasing cultural sophistication. However, it also created psychological alienation (discussed below) and social conflicts. The existing social system, which had been stable for hundreds of years, functioned only in an agrarian economy of peasants, aristocratic landowners, and a small class of skilled craftspeople. It had no way of accommodating the newly created classes, such as urban industrial workers and entrepreneurial commoners—who sometimes became richer and more powerful than most aristocrats.

Theorists proposed new systems of social organization: nationalist, socialist, democratic, totalitarian. Advocates made supposedly-rational arguments for why each was right; yet supporters mostly just chose the system that might benefit their in-group against others. Conflicts between them tore societies apart, often even into civil war.

Different countries tried each of the new systems, and all produced vast disasters:

  • nationalism led to World War I;
  • capitalism caused the world-wide Great Depression;1
  • fascism was to blame for World War II;
  • communism killed tens of millions with engineered famines and the mass murder of supposed dissidents.

WWI marked the end of naive faith in the systematic mode. Most countries went into the war confident of quick victory, confident of its necessity and ethical rightness, confident that war was an opportunity for glory, heroism, and unity. God was on our side.

For Europe, it was the first industrial war,2 with the new social and mechanical technologies of mass production turning out deaths instead of automobiles. Four years later, after tens of millions of casualties, extraordinary horror and suffering, the traumatized survivors asked not “was it worth it” but “what was that all about, anyway?”

In retrospect, WWI seemed completely pointless. Or, if it had any meaning, it was to point out that the pre-war systems of meaning must have been disastrously wrong. The 1800s had seemed an era of rapid moral progress as well as economic and scientific progress. That was no longer credible. This disillusionment increased support for alternatives, including socialist internationalism, fascism, explicit anti-modernism, and explicit nihilism.

One pointless, catastrophic world war might be a tragic accident. To fight another, even worse one—the worst human-created disaster ever—just twenty years later, goes beyond carelessness. When the victors of WWII immediately began preparing to fight WWIII among themselves—this time with potentially billions of deaths from nuclear weapons—it was widely regarded as a bad idea. Yet Cold War belligerents on both sides felt justified by their systems of meaning: benevolent socialist internationalism versus benevolent liberal democracy.

Systematicity itself was a major cause of the catastrophe. Leaders and peoples took their rational ideologies far too seriously, and acted on flawed theoretical prescriptions.

Why did they choose not to see the systems were failing? Eternalism. The only alternative to blind faith in the system seemed to be nihilism.

From the standpoint of each ideology, the others looked nihilistic:

  • For democratic capitalism, communism and fascism looked nihilistic in denying civil and human rights and the ultimate value of the individual.
  • For communism, capitalism and fascism denied the ultimate value of solidarity—the brotherhood of all—and the economic rights of the working class.
  • For fascism, the economic focus of communism and capitalism denied all values other than material ones. They denied the ultimate value of nation-state-ethnicity. They subordinated the noble, high culture of the elite to the vulgar, degenerate culture of the rabble.

Any relaxing of the defense of the system could only lead to the nihilist apocalypse. And, indeed, many thought the World Wars were the nihilist apocalypse—although in reality they were caused far more by eternalism than nihilism. On the other hand, a few thinkers started to suspect that it was systems as such that had been the problem. Among these were forerunners of the countercultures, such as the existentialists and Beats.3

Culture in crisis

Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2

Art falling apart.
Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912
(a/k/a “Explosion in the tile factory”)

While the systematic mode worked—up to WWI—the role of “high” culture was to express and reinforce the values of the system. Great art was, by definition, morally improving. The arts tried to be pure, inspiring, and uplifting. They provided an idealized vision of the smooth workings of meaning as it was meant to be.

High culture expressed the sacred eternal values of the elites—the “bourgeoise”—who were its patrons. Popular culture sometimes ignored or mocked elite values; but that was ephemeral rubbish.

Starting in the late 1800s, and accelerating after WWI, artists flipped all that on its head. High art began instead to expose the cracks in the system. It articulated the widely-felt sense of disintegration, of loss of certainty. It spoke to the anxiety, confusion, and even horror that came from the failure of all foundations; but also the freedom and joy that came with liberation from eternalism.4

Artists, in all media, systematically rejected past artistic systems, and the rational structures that justified them.5 Painters rejected geometrical perspective, the great achievement of Renaissance art. Composers rejected tonality, which had been the foundation of music for several centuries, and experimented with severe dissonances. Writers abandoned grammar, punctuation, prosody, sense, and all other “restrictive” forms.

At the extreme, the arts became entirely anti-sense, incoherent, or explicitly nihilistic. (This anticipates the incoherence of the atomized mode most of a century later.) Artists hurled globs of paint at a canvas; composers arranged notes by rolling dice; writers cut individual words out of a book, shook them up, pulled ones out at random and called the result a poem. Beyond even this random art was anti-art—seeming to be outright nihilism. An empty picture frame declared to be a painting; John Cage’s four minutes and 33 seconds of silence declared to be music; a blank page, a poem. Tristan Tzara, a key theorist, wrote “I am against systems; the most acceptable system is on principle to have none” and “logic is always false.”

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917

Is this art? How can you tell?
(Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917)

High art also increasingly rejected all existing social systems. Biting the hands that fed it, it adopted the attitude épater la bourgeoisie: scandalize polite society!

The new job of art was not to uplift, but to overthrow. Eventually, you could not be a serious artist unless you constantly proclaimed your contempt and hatred for the middle and upper classes, for capitalism, for Victorian morality, for religion, for any sort of taboo or restriction. To be an artist was by definition to be a revolutionary. Simply maintaining an oppositional attitude became sufficient; art and social critique became inseparable.

Popular and high art now changed places. The middle and working classes had growing spending power, and entrepreneurs discovered that popular culture could be profitable. Commercial culture came to represent the “traditional values” of the systematic mode, where high art—the avant-garde—satirized and undermined them. Theorists proclaimed that all popular art was just kitsch—the cultural expression of eternalism.

Here began the “culture war,” which became particularly important in the countercultural mode.

The self in crisis

Charlie Chaplin, Modern Times, 1936

Systematic society required, and made partially possible, systematic selves. Systematic persons were rational individuals who conformed to, and enforced, systematic social values. This advance began breaking down in the first half of the twentieth century, due to systematicity’s harmful side-effects. Its requirements came to seem oppressive, meaningless, and for some, impossible. Selves fractured and broke under the stress.

Work in the industrial economy felt dehumanizing. Extreme division of labor made most people tiny, interchangeable cogs in a vast, incomprehensible, relentless machine. The functioning of the economy as a whole became opaque, so it was impossible to see the meaning of one’s own work, and the system’s demands seemed senseless. And, indeed, working conditions often were not only awful, but pointlessly awful.

Urban, industrial social organization increasingly alienated people from each other and from nature. The systematic self—based on a rigorous self/other boundary—made this worse, and even separated people from their own everyday experience. It became possible, for the first time, to feel lonely and isolated while in a crowd.

The mid–1800s introduced a new “Victorian” sexual morality and a new culture of the family. These addressed genuine social problems with some success. In the absence of reliable contraceptive technology, and limited food production, sexual restraint lessened the rate at which children died of starvation. The new concept of a private home life developed partly as refuge from the stresses of the work world, and was closely analogous to the new enclosed interiority of the systematic self.

However, these innovations also caused stress and misery for many people. For example, England had large, persistent surpluses of women, making it mathematically impossible for all to conform to the demand that they marry. Many people (men and women, adults and children) found the regimented ideology of duty-filled family relationships an onerous grind at best, and in some cases intolerable. Yet they were nearly inescapable. The newly private nuclear family could also conceal pathology and abuse that earlier, more open extended families might have successfully intervened in.

Increasing social complexity requires you to act as several different people in different places. Some of those partial-selves are false fronts; others may seem natural. If your personality is quite different at work and at home, which is the real you?

Ecstasy is the natural antidote to the sense that administering the systematic self—holding everything together—is exhausting. Choiceless cultures periodically celebrate with joyful non-ordinary states of consciousness, produced by community ritual, intoxicants, and relaxation of social role norms. Systematic cultures deliberately banned these as threats.6 Even this temporary escape route was cut off.

Many people began to ask: Why? For what? Given the rigidities of the system, even the best possible life outcomes would be quite unsatisfactory for most people. The restrictions seemed arbitrary, unnecessary, and unfair. When you ask “why?”, a system is supposed to always have an answer; but as the twentieth century staggered from crisis to catastrophe to breakdown, religious and political platitudes no longer seemed adequate. Rationalist certainty had also collapsed. Justifications based on abstraction and generality are sterile; when the systems they support are visibly failing, they come to seem meaningless.

In the anxiety of relativism, as eternalism disintegrates, one doubts everything. Yet the system has to reject doubters. They are criminal, mad, degenerate, lazy, undesirable; and punished or cast out accordingly. What then? Perhaps I am mad? Or a criminal? Perhaps “good” and “evil” no longer have any meaning? Perhaps meaning itself is impossible…

And so there developed new words for problems of the self, reflecting the new possibility of nihilism:

  • Alienation, in the mismatch between social roles and internal experience
  • Anomie, the feeling that social norms have broken down and become irrelevant
  • Neurosis, theorized to be caused by failure to adapt to stifling social requirements
  • Identity crisis, the feeling of loss of any meaningful self
  • Existential angst, the feeling accompanying nihilistic doubt

Many people adapted easily enough to systematic requirements, and constructed reasonably functional systematic selves. Others found it difficult, and were miserable; some failed altogether.7 In breakdown, the self is experienced as fragmented, incoherent, and hostile to itself.

Freud

Freud’s enormous influence during the first half of the twentieth century was due to his pioneering explanations—however incomplete and incorrect—of these problems.

A fully systematic self, he argued, is biologically impossible. The ideal of the self as the rational chief of a smoothly functioning internal bureaucracy is unrealizable. Not only is the self not an in-dividual, it is always actually divided. Most of what happens inside ourselves we cannot even know about: it is unconscious. The ego—what we most think of as self—is a hapless clown, caught between vastly more powerful forces.

The monstrous, irrational, amoral, chaotic id mainly does as it pleases; then the tyrannical, persecutory superego punishes us for desires and acts beyond our control, inducing constant anxiety and guilt. The ego’s mechanisms of defense against them, such as repression, denial, regression, and projection, are themselves mainly violent failures of rational self-management. They mirror the mechanisms of social oppression.

Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), perhaps Freud’s most influential work, argued that because the conflict between social demands and individual desires was unavoidable, deep dissatisfaction was inescapable. The best we can hope for is to “replace neurotic misery with common unhappiness.”

Despite this profoundly gloomy conclusion, psychoanalysis functioned as a para-religion for millions of people. As a system for making sense of meaning in all its dimensions, it often fit lived experience better than Christianity.

During the middle of the century, psychoanalysis evolved away from orthodox Freudianism, in several productive directions. Object-relations theory recognized that relationships had great human value, not just instrumentally but intrinsically. It also developed more sophisticated and accurate understandings of the internal structure of the self and its fragmentation. Psychoanalysis also hybridized with existentialism, arguably deepening each. Both hybridized with Marxism, producing trenchant new analyses of the failures of the systematic mode, and suggesting new revolutionary possibilities. These were a major impetus for the 1960s–70s counterculture.

Responses: totalitarianism and existentialism

The main alternative, while all systems were failing, appeared to be nihilism—the end of meaning. However, two other responses developed during 1914–64: totalitarianism and existentialism.

These had some of the characteristics of countercultures, as I’ll define them on the next page. Both proposed alternatives to the failing mainstream, and were often anti-rational.8 Each contributed to counterculturalism: existentialism especially influenced the monist counterculture, and totalitarianism the dualist counterculture.

Totalitarianism

By “totalitarianism” I mean attempts to make a system work by force. (This is not quite the standard definition, but it’s close.) This includes fascism, actually-existing communism,9 and theocractic fundamentalism.

Totalitarianism is now mostly discredited in the West, so it’s important to understand why it made sense in the mid-twentieth century—and why it still makes sense to billions of people elsewhere.

Any serious system has a network of justifications that answer all “why” questions—not perfectly, but well enough for most people most of the time. So it ought to work. Moreover, systems mostly did work, for several centuries. Even in the 1950s, many liberal Western economists and political scientists considered that the Soviet bloc had an unfair advantage, because its leaders could simply order everyone to do what had to be done. They favored democratic institutions on ethical grounds, but believed that communism was more efficient economically—so the West might be doomed. (It wasn’t until the 2000s that the reasons non-systematic economies outperform started to be commonly understood.)

Like all eternalism, totalitarianism is based on the fantasy of control; it promises salvation if you conform to the dictates of the system. That promise is enormously appealing, and explains why Hitler, Stalin, and Mao had broad popular support—and why Islamic fundamentalism has broad popular support now.

The totalitarian intuition is that society would work if everyone just did what they were supposed to. And this is largely correct. Despite nearly opposite ideologies, Norway and Singapore are now among the highest-functioning countries in the world, because there is a general agreement among their citizens to do the right thing. In low-functioning countries, there is a de facto agreement to ignore pro-social norms in favor of personal or clan advancement. So why not just make everyone behave?

Totalitarianism’s flaws become apparent when it collides with nebulosity. It then uses all the eternalist ploys to maintain allegiance in the face of failure. Most obviously, totalitarianism is armed and armored to restore order by force. This requires purification, eventually by killing everyone who impedes the operation of the system (kulaks, Jews, apostates, profiteers, perverts, oppressors, idolators, elitists, degenerates, running-dog capitalist-roaders, intellectuals, counter-revolutionaries, etc.). Totalitarian leadership is typically addicted to magical thinking and pretending to believe. For the masses, they encourage thought suppression and kitsch.

Speaking of kitsch, all totalitarian movements see it as job one to suppress and destroy avant-garde art.10 Avant-garde art points to nebulosity and mocks systematicity—as such, not just specific systems. The Soviets declared it “counter-revolutionary,” and made “socialist realism” the only legal style. (That was state-worshipping propaganda kitsch in a style crudely imitating late–1800s Academic painting.) The Nazis declared the avant-garde “degenerate,” “nonsensical,” and “Jewish,” and banned it in favor of their own Classically-inspired propaganda kitsch. Nowadays, fundamentalists preach against it, ban it where they can, and promote religious kitsch.

In the social realm, I mentioned two problems: class conflict and world war. Totalitarianism deals with the first by banning it. (That was easy, wasn’t it? If you kill everyone responsible for class conflict, it will just go away.) Totalitarians love world wars—eternalism deludes them that they are fated to win and establish a global Soviet / Reich / Caliphate11—so that’s not a problem either.

Totalitarianism requires a self that is systematic but transparent. Choiceless selves—embedded in local community relationships—cannot conform to the will of a national or global system. Individuals—who have a private mental realm—may choose to resist the system, or hide dissenting thoughts from the system. The totalitarian self must be submerged in the State, or surrendered to God, renouncing personal boundaries. That is attractive, for many people, by relieving them of the burdens of choice. (Eternalism simulates choicelessness.) However, complete surrender is impossible to accomplish, which is one reason totalitarianism has not been more successful.

Existentialism

Existentialism rejected all systems of meaning in favor of choosing personal meanings. I’ve analyzed that extensively earlier in the book,12 so here I’ll say only a little.

Systematic eternalism tries to make meaning objective. During the twentieth century, this became obviously unworkable. Many saw nihilism as the only possible alternative, but (rightly) considered it unacceptable. Existentialists tried to create a third possibility: that meaning could be subjective rather than objective. In fact, they said, “authentic” meaning had to be subjective: a purely individual choice or creation, without any justification. They claimed that perfect internal freedom of choice made this possible, whatever the external circumstances.

This can’t work. Meaning is a collaborative activity. It is neither objective nor subjective. It is created by interaction, and abides in that space-between. Also, we do not have perfect internal freedom. Selves are constituted by biology and by society and culture. People cannot become ideal independent rational agents with perfectly-crisp boundaries and unlimited free will.

Bizarrely, while advocating total rejection of social values, several of the most important existentialists also advocated totalitarian social systems. For example, Heidegger supported Nazism and Sartre supported Soviet communism. Camus, last and best of the existentialists, was left to diagnose both its failure modes. He explained how purely subjective meaning slides into nihilism, split with Sartre over communism, and consistently denounced totalitarianism.

Unfortunately, existentialism’s incoherent combination of extreme individualism and extreme collectivism carried on into the countercultures a couple decades later. That was a main reason for their failure.

  • 1. Or, at any rate, this was widely believed.
  • 2. The American Civil War was the first industrial war overall, anticipating most of the features of WWI on a smaller—but still appalling—scale.
  • 3. Around the same time—1951—Kenneth Arrow proved mathematically that there is no such thing as a “fair” system of government. This could be seen as part of the general collapse of rational certainty in the 1914–1964 period. I suspect Arrow’s proof significantly influenced elite decision-makers, as the general crisis in rationality did, even though there’s never been any public awareness of it.
  • 4. This movement in the arts was called “modernism”. As I mentioned earlier, in other contexts “modern” refers to different periods. In particular, “modernism” in the arts corresponds to the breakdown of the “modernity” that prevailed from the 1400s through the 1800s.
  • 5. Artistic modernism grew out of Romanticism. Romantic art was sometimes explicitly anti-rational, but still mainly worked within the Classical forms. It maintained strong emotional coherence, and was more-or-less realistic. Generally it also supported existing social structures, or at most sought to reform them, rather than destroy them.
  • 6. Calvinism pioneered this move, but you see the same in communist prudery, for example. Romanticism, in both the artistic and spiritual realms, revolted against puritanism—and so was a precursor to the 1960s counterculture.
  • 7. Of course, success in adapting to systematic requirements depended both on one’s personal capacity and predilections, and on one’s position in the social structure.
  • 8. On the other hand, fascist ethno-nationalism was not exactly universalist, where the 1960s–80s countercultures were; and communism at least pretended to rationality.
  • 9. Some communists argue that all supposed communist regimes were not really communist, and true communism would not be totalitarian. I find this unconvincing, but have added “actually-existing” to avoid arguing about it. I wonder whether anyone argues that true fascism would not be totalitarian?
  • 10. Not coincidentally, my page on eternalist kitsch draws heavily on Kundera’s analysis of totalitarian kitsch.
  • 11. As I write this, ISIS—the global caliphate—is just about to conquer Rome. According to the caliph, as quoted in his press releases today, anyway.
  • 12. Actually, as of the time I’m writing this early in 2015, those sections of the book exist only as notes, and do not yet appear on the web. Existentialism is relevant to many of the themes of Meaningness, and I will discuss it in—at minimum—the chapters on meaningfulness, boundaries, self, and purpose.

The collapse of rational certainty

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

For centuries, the systematic mode provided certainty, based on illusory understandings of meaningness. Its certainty and understandings rested on two foundations: the Christian Church and scientific rationality. In the early 1900s, both failed.

Everyone knows a little about one half of the story: how science undermined religious belief, but failed to provide an alternative basis for meaning.

Less well known is the story of how rationalist certainty ended; how it dug too deep, and undermined its own foundations. After a series of crises, the inescapable conclusion was that mathematics and physics cannot supply the ultimate justifications that seemed possible in the 1800s.

I believe this was a major factor in the breakdown of the systematic mode and eventual collapse of all systems of meaning. That is not widely recognized, perhaps for several reasons:

  • Since we have lived without rationalist certainty for nearly a century, it is difficult now to appreciate the shock and terror its loss provoked at the time.
  • It was only the cognitive elites who fully understood and felt the loss. As the mass media explained that there was a problem, only a vague anxiety that science no longer made sense trickled down.
  • Mathematicians and scientists have mostly learned to live with ambiguity and incoherence.
  • The consequences have still not been fully felt, because rationalist eternalism is still common—even though it is known to be unworkable.
  • The loss of rationalist certainty was deliberately misinterpreted by anti-rationalist eternalists, and given spurious new quasi-religious meanings. (This comes in monist and dualist flavors. The monist version promotes quantum woo, Gödel woo, and so on. The dualist version is Christian (or Islamic or dualist-Hindu) woo. The general reasoning is: “rationality has failed, therefore it can’t rule out our metaphysical dogmas, therefore our dogmas are Ultimate Truth.” Monist irrationalism justifies Idealism and the unity of the True Self with The Absolute: “blah blah Consciousness blah blah God blah ineffable wonderfulness blah.” Dualist irrationalism justifies Creationism, Sharia, and afterlife Salvation.)

The end of rationalist certainty was not one event. It came as a series of unexpected, unwanted discoveries, throughout the first half of the twentieth century. A full account would take a long book. Here I will cover only some key events: non-Euclidean geometry, relativity, quantum, and the foundational crisis in mathematics caused by problems with infinities.

Most people probably know that relativity and quantum came as shocks, but maybe not quite why. The crisis in mathematics is less known, but perhaps more important, because it was even more fundamental.

Countercultures: modernity’s last gasp

The Battle of Gibraltar (1607): painting showing galleons in combat

The countercultural mode of the 1960s-80s marked the final attempts to rescue the glory of systems from the maw of nihilistic collapse. It failed, and we live in its wreckage.

It would be polite to say “enduring influence” but I’d rather call it “wreckage.” As civilization burned, we built two vast, fantastical, ornate galleons as escape ships. But they were not the slightest bit sea-worthy; and they collided and broke up in the harbor. The crash left a floating mass of broken spars and tangled lines, choking access to the exit.

Millions of people are still trying to live on that flotsam, so you call across: “It’s a pile of water-logged junk; the rest will sink soon; why don’t you come join us in our fleet of nimble new watercraft?” They jeer that your pathetic little boats are made of plastic, and you say “it’s not plastic, it’s a kevlar composite kayak,” and so on.

This is a metaphor for the development of modes of meaningness over the past half-century. “Kayaks” will become clear only when I get to the fluid mode. But let’s talk galleons: the two countercultures.

I define the countercultural mode of meaningness as:

Developing a new, alternative, universalist, eternalist, anti-rational system for society, culture, and self, meant to replace the mainstream.

I discuss two movements that fit this definition: the “hippie” counterculture of the 1960s-70s, and the “Moral Majority” counterculture of the 1970s-80s.1

Goals for this discussion

The content of the countercultures is still all around us: rock concerts and televangelists, for instance. Such content is familiar to everyone, and needs no review.

The structure and function of the countercultures may be less understood. What problems did they address, and how were their solutions supposed to work? In what ways did they succeed and fail, and why? That is my topic here.

One goal is to understand the continuing influence of the countercultures, and especially the way their “culture war” has polarized Western societies. I will suggest that much of this polarization is due to a pervasive misunderstanding of the structure and function of the countercultures. Better understanding might help heal the rift. The two had much more in common than they recognized—both in terms of what was right about them, and what was wrong. They were both good-faith attempts to rescue systematic eternalism, using similar methods. That was impossible, however, and they both failed for the same reasons.

The following mode, the subcultural mode, can only be analyzed as a response to countercultural failure—so the failure must be understood. The subcultural and atomized modes also failed, so we still have most of the same problems—but in different forms, because each mode has transformed meaningness in its own way.

The countercultural mode is “native” only for the Baby Boom generation. It is very different from the subcultural and atomized modes, native to Generations X and Y. One goal of this whole history of meaningness is to help give people in each generation access to each other’s way of processing meaning.

Overview of the section

I’ll begin by expanding on the definition “new, alternative, universalist, eternalist, anti-rational systems,” showing how the two countercultures fit each part of that.

The counterculture” generally refers to the youth movement of the 1960s to early 1970s. The idea that the American “Christian conservative” movement of the late 1970s and 1980s was also a counterculture may seem implausible at first. It does fit that definition, however.

I will suggest that the two countercultures are best understood as monist and dualist, respectively. You might call them “leftist” and “rightist,” but those words are not well-defined. In fact, “left” and “right” changed their meanings during the countercultural era, in what I will describe as a “ninety degree clockwise rotation.”

Both countercultures attempted to address the problems of meaningness caused by the failure of the systematic mode during the first half of the 20th century. Although the content of their proposed solutions were often opposed, the structure was the same. Both attempted to create a new, optimistic, revitalized systematicity, by rejecting rationality and developing new religious technologies of the self. Both sought to reform society by collapsing the distinction between the personal and the political.

Both countercultures used the time distortion tricks of “invented traditions” and “timeworn futures” to make their dubious proposals seem more attractive. The “hippie” counterculture pretended to be progressive, but mainly recycled early-1800s Romanticism; the “Moral Majority” counterculture pretended to be traditional, but had a radical modern agenda. These deliberate deceptions account for some of the acrimony of the culture war.

Although both countercultures developed impressively thick and wide approaches to problems of meaning, both failed, for the same reason. Systematicity can never succeed on its own terms; it cannot be absolute. Reality is nebulous, and systems cannot fully grasp its variability. The universalism of the countercultures was their undoing. They could not accommodate the growing demand for cultural, social, and psychological diversity. Subcultures could, and did.

I find understanding the countercultures as monist and dualist helpful, in the light of my earlier analysis of what is right and wrong in these two stances, and how the correct aspects of each can be combined and reconciled in the complete stance of participation. This suggests ways the “left vs. right” polarization of current politics, culture, and society might also be resolvable.

The countercultures were the two final attempts to rescue eternalism: the last gasp of modernity. The following, subcultural mode was the first in-breath of the post-systematic—or post-modern—world.

  • 1. Some earlier movements might also fit this definition; for instance Romanticism and existentialism. Socialism would fit except it was rationalist; fascism would fit except it was non-universalist. All four of these fed into the 60s-80s movements. I concentrate on the 60s-80s because my goal is to understand the most direct influences on our current mode of meaningness, rather than developing a general theory of history. Islamic fundamentalism is also mainly countercultural; I will return to this point later in the history.

What makes a counterculture?

Galleon wreck on beach
Artwork courtesy Cesar Sampedro

I defined the two countercultures as “new, alternative, universalist, eternalist, anti-rational systems.” This page expands that definition, explaining the characteristics shared by the two. It also begins to contrast them with subculturalism—the following mode of meaningness.

Recall that the two countercultures are the monist “radical” 1960s-70s youth movement and the dualist “conservative” movement of the 1970s-80s. The next page explains how these relate to monism and dualism. It also explains why I call the “Moral Majority” conservative movement a counterculture—but that should start to become clear already in this page.

The discussion here is America-centric, because that’s what I know best. Much of it applies to other countries, but details differ.

New

After the nightmare of WWII, everyone was exhausted, and just wanted everything to go back to normal for a while. “Normal” would mean the systematic mode functioning smoothly; and the 1950s were dedicated to making that happen. But none of the problems of meaningness from the first half of the century had gone away. Beneath the veneer of normality, the cracks in the systems were still widening.

Both countercultures were motivated by disgust at the hypocrisy of the mainstream. The mainstream’s relatively smooth functioning was based on eternalistic pretending. In fact, mainstream society, culture, and self now failed to provide meaning. They had been rotted from within by nihilism, leaving a brittle shell of eternalistic forms that concealed fundamental corruption. Shell-shocked, these systems were going through the motions with a business-as-usual attitude, but without authentic commitment.

Both countercultures perceived a pervasive moral breakdown in the mainstream, caused by loss of meaning, although they disagreed about specific values.

Alternative

The countercultures considered tinkering around the edges inadequate. They proposed wholesale replacement of mainstream society, culture, and self with alternative systems. They defined themselves point-by-point in contrast with the mainstream; that opposition was the counter in counterculture.

In the 1970s, “alternative” was a synonym for “monist counterculture,” in fact. An “alternative bookstore” sold New Age books; an “alternative grocer” sold alfalfa sprouts and tofu. Both were organized as anarchist collectives. The dualist counterculture positioned itself as the alternative to a society whose institutions had been captured by degenerate liberalism. It particularly opposed decisions by the American Supreme Court such as Roe v. Wade (abortion), Engel v. Vitale (school prayer) and Bob Jones University (racial discrimination). Both countercultures used the rhetoric of romantic rebellion against illegitimate authority to motivate followers.

The subcultures, by contrast, were not interested in replacing the mainstream; they just wanted to be left alone to do their own thing. In fact, during most of the subcultural era, there was no mainstream. The many subcultures were different from each other, but they were not “alternative.”

Universalist

Universalism—the claim that what is right, is right for everyone, everywhere, eternally—is a key feature of the systematic mode. The countercultures retained it: both proposed universalist alternatives. The monist counterculture said that everyone should recycle, get over their sexual hangups, and expand their consciousness. The dualist counterculture said that everyone should go to church, save it for marriage, and pledge allegiance to the flag.

Universalism proved to be the countercultures’ undoing. It became apparent in the 1980s that neither counterculture could command a majority. People are unfixably diverse, and different people want all sorts of different social, cultural, and personal arrangements.

The subcultural mode abandoned universalism; that was its foremost difference from the countercultural mode.

Eternalist

Both countercultures tried to rescue systematic eternalism from creeping nihilism. Both had optimistic, positive visions, to make everything authentically meaningful—in contrast to the make-believe mainstream.

The subcultures, on the other hand, were often explicitly nihilist. Punk was the first subculture; the Sex Pistols’ “I am an antichrist / I am an anarchist / I don’t know what I want / But I know how to get it / I want to destroy the passerby” blew counterculturalism to bits.

Anti-rational

Both countercultures explicitly rejected rationality, which had been a foundation of the systematic mode. All possible rational bases for systems had been tried, and had failed. Rationality had shown that meaning was neither objective nor subjective, which was misunderstood as implying nihilism: that meaning did not exist at all. Rationality, counterculturalists thought, was probably to blame for all the Twentieth Century horrors: the World Wars, loss of Christian faith, rampant materialism, ecological devastation, abortion, and nuclear weapons.

New anti-rational religious movements organized meanings for both countercultures. The hippie counterculture ransacked history to find and revive monist spiritual systems. They adopted “Eastern religions,” plus vintage-1800 German Romantic Idealism, which was repackaged as “the New Age” to disguise its unsavory origins. The dualist counterculture replaced rationalized mainline Christianity with wacky fundamentalist, charismatic, and dispensationalist innovations.

On both sides, these new religions promoted supernatural practices and transformative inner experiences (“enlightenment” and “being born again”). They deemphasized or dropped codes of conduct and doctrine.

Subcultures, having set aside the failed quest for ultimacy and universality, did not need to take any particular position on rationality. With the countercultures having passed, there is room for the fluid mode to reclaim a relativized, non-foundational, pragmatic rationality.

Systems

The monist counterculture claimed to offer revolutionary new ideas, and both it and the dualist one made some genuine innovations, but neither broke away from the fundamental paradigm of systematicity. At their best, they offered new, different systems. However, it was systematicity itself that was fatally flawed; and so the countercultures sank.

Subculturalism stepped away from systematicity—or what many historians call “modernity.” The countercultural era was modernity’s last gasp, and the subcultures the first breath of postmodernity.

Hippies and Evangelicals: monist and dualist countercultures

Francis Schaeffer
Francis Schaeffer, hippie guru and architect of the modern Religious Right

“The counterculture” generally refers to the youth movement of the 1960s-70s: rock and roll, anti-war protests, psychedelics, the New Left, hippies, and the sexual revolution. While puzzling out how these elements cohered—to understand the counterculture functionally and structurally—I had a peculiar realization.

A second movement shared “the” counterculture’s abstract features—its structure and function. Based in Christian Fundamentalism, it might be called “the Moral Majority,” after one of its main organizations. It too offered “a new, alternative, universalist, eternalist, anti-rational system.” This was the same mode of relating to meaningness, even though its content was deliberately opposed to most of what the hippie counterculture stood for.

This page explains how these two countercultures adopted the stances of monism and dualism, respectively. This is key to understanding their workings, as detailed in later pages.

Both countercultures had broken up by 1990, but the current American culture war is fought from floating fragments of their wreckage. I believe that a better understanding of how the two countercultures related to each other, and how both relate to subsequent modes of meaningness, may help resolve unnecessary contemporary conflicts.

Monism, dualism, and the countercultures

“Left” and “right” would be the obvious names for the two countercultures, but that could be misleading. These terms are not well-defined, and had different meanings during the countercultural era than they did before or after.

Our current left and right like to be called “progressive” and “traditional”; and the countercultures might have liked that too. However, I will suggest that this characterization is a deliberately misleading fiction, promoted by both.

It would be more accurate to cast the countercultures in religious terms, as “holism” versus “holiness.” Or, in ethical terms, as “permissive” versus “restrictive”; or in social terms as “egalitarian” versus “respecting hierarchical differences.”

These contrasts concern boundaries and distinctions, one of the main dimensions of meaningness. So I call the two countercultures “monist” and “dualist”:

  • Monism seeks to deny, dissolve, or weaken boundaries and distinctions. (Holism is nearly the same thing as monism.) It seeks to discover and strengthen connections.
  • Dualism seeks to fixate, establish, or strengthen boundaries and distinctions. (Holiness is all about sharpening the difference between the sacred or Godly and the profane or sinful.) It seeks to sever connections that cross apparent boundaries.

Monism and dualism are both wrong, and both harmful. Every boundary is always both patterned and nebulous. Boundaries are not, cannot be, and should not be, either non-existent nor perfectly sharp. Severe problems, including our current culture war, follow from trying to eliminate or absolutize them. An understanding of participation, the stance that the resolves the monism/dualism confusion, may help resolve these conflicts.

This page explains what made the “hippie” counterculture monist, first; and then what made the “Moral Majority” counterculture dualist. We’ll see also that the monist counterculture had some dualist elements; and that the dualist counterculture tacitly accepted some “hippie” monist boundary-blurrings.

Much of this material is controversial. Reading it, you may have strong emotional reactions, categorizing particular countercultural moves as good or bad. I would suggest trying to suspend such judgements. Each had, I think, both good and bad effects.

I hope you will recognize that I do not support either counterculture against the other. I find some aspects of each attractive, and some repellent. Overall, it is most important to understand why both were wrong, and both failed. But it is also valuable to understand what was right in each, and what might be worth saving from their wreckage.

On this page, I go into the history of the dualist counterculture in somewhat more detail, because it’s probably less well-known to most readers, and because I’ve written about the monist-countercultural religious left extensively elsewhere. If I seem critical of the 1980s Religious Right here, I assure you that I was just as hostile to the monist left there.

How the monist counterculture was monist

The specific contents of the monist counterculture—from recycling to Vietnam war protests—are familiar. Less obvious is the general pattern: that the specifics reflect the monist stance. It attempted to dissolve many particular boundaries, on the theory that they were illegitimate, alienating, and needlessly limiting. I’ll discuss these boundary erasures here only briefly. Some I’ve explained earlier in the book; many, I’ll return to in greater detail later.

Psychedelic drugs were a cornerstone of the counterculture; boundary-blurring is one of their major effects. They can give a sense of ultimate, cosmic unity—the supposed accomplishment of the monist stance. Short of that, they often melt distinctions of all sorts. It’s common, for instance, to have experiences of the commonality of all people, of humans with other creatures, and of the animate and inanimate.

Ecology—a new science—revealed that all life is connected in an intricate web of mutual dependencies. A cultural and political movement based on it began with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962. Taking the unification of concerns a step further, countercultural theorist Theodore Roszak promoted “ecopsychology,” collapsing the distinctions among the natural, political, psychological, and spiritual worlds.

When you have experienced your intimate sameness with a tree, it is hard to take seriously human categories such as religions, nations, and races. The political universalism of the counterculture—the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, feminism—was based in this monist conception of human commonality.

The feminist slogan “the personal is political” expressed the essence of monist politics. The private/public boundary, a foundational principle for Victorian systematicity, disintegrated. The distinction between ethics (“ought” in the personal realm) and politics (“ought” in the public realm) collapsed. This collapse caused the culture war we’ve been cursed with since, so I devote a full page to it later.

Blurring the self/other distinction also contributed to the collapse of the boundary between psychology and religion (or “spirituality”). Monist religion holds that one’s True Self is the same as God, and the entire universe. Thus, exploration of one’s personal psychology gives direct insight into the most profound metaphysical questions. Monism erased the boundary between sacred and profane matters; nothing was any longer outside the purview of spiritual concern.

Since the personal was now both political and spiritual, the distinction between religion and politics also collapsed. Demands for political change were considered not merely a matter of one social group promoting its material interests against others, but to reflect Ultimate Truth as given by the monist eternal ordering principle.

The “sexual revolution” dissolved the sexual boundary of marriage, and eliminated most distinctions between “morally” acceptable and unacceptable sexual acts. The sexual revolution also reflected a collapse of the division between private and public morality. Privately, sexual mores had been loosening for half a century. A considerable gap had opened between what people did in their bedrooms and what they said in public. This was one of the most obvious forms of the 1950s moral hypocrisy that motivated the counterculture. To a significant extent, the sexual revolution merely allowed everyone to acknowledge what many had already been doing.

Feminism broke down boundaries between male and female social, sexual, and family roles.

The nuclear family home—a mainly Victorian middle-class invention—had long been found restrictive and isolating by many. The monist counterculture advocated replacing it with communes, collectives, and intentional communities: social structures that emphasize connections across biological families, and that break down the private/public boundary.

How the monist counterculture was dualist

Monism and dualism contain each other, and each turns into the other near boundaries. Monism—the denial of all boundaries—nevertheless draws an absolute boundary between itself and dualism. It rejects dualism as an absolutely unacceptable evil. It seeks to destroy dualism; or, failing that, to purify itself of any dualistic tendencies.

The monist counterculture went out of its way to shock, aggravate, and alienate “squares,” i.e. dualists. The point was to harden the distinction between monists and dualists. As Ken Kesey put it, “Either you are on the bus, or you are off the bus.” “On the bus” came to mean “monist”—and either you rode monism all the way, or you were off the bus and left behind.

Hippies were a tiny subculture in 1964, the year of the Further bus trip. Requiring intense commitment, and some hostility to outsiders, are necessary for maintaining the integrity of a subculture—as we’ll see later. Kesey’s attitude was sensible then.

Subcultural hippiedom formed the core of the monist counterculture (together with Berkeley student radicalism). As a local subculture of dozens scaled up into a global counterculture of tens of millions, “either you are on or you are off” became the recipe for the culture war that still plagues us.

How the dualist counterculture was dualist

The dualist counterculture was a mirror image of the monist one: the same shape, with many aspects flipped left-to-right, and others left intact.1

The creators of the dualist counterculture presented it largely as a reaction to the monist one. In their view, the monist counterculture had wrongly blurred numerous boundaries. Those therefore needed sharpening—the essence of dualism.

As a point-by-point opposition to the monist program, the dualist “counter-counterculture” necessarily took on its opponent’s structure. We could go through all the boundaries I listed above as denied by the monist counterculture, and we’d find that most were fixated by the dualist one. For example, dualists promoted:

  • man’s dominion over nature
  • submission to the Creator
  • and to legitimate secular authority
  • nationalism
  • racial segregation
  • distinct gender roles
  • the sanctity of marriage versus the sinfulness of non-marital sex
  • human rights starting from the instant of conception, not gradually over months

All this is familiar territory. I want only to point out that the unifying feature of these positions is that they draw hard boundaries.

The dualist counterculture also claimed to want to restore “traditional values.” It was never clear which era it proposed to return to; in fact, it wanted to “restore” a romanticized, mythical past in which the systematic mode actually worked. But to the extent that the systematic mode did work—in the 1850s or 1950s—it was partly on the basis of dualism. Taking those eras as ideals naturally also led to dualism.

So, for reasons of both reaction and nostalgia, insistence on boundaries is the common feature throughout the explicit “values agenda” of the dualist counterculture.

How the dualist counterculture was monist

Although the Religious Right presented itself as a point-by-point repudiation, it adopted much of the structure, strategy, tactics, and conceptual framework of the monist counterculture.2 Several factors forced this similarity:

  • It implicitly adopted some monist principles
  • It deliberately imitated the monist counterculture
  • Surprisingly many leftist hippies later became Evangelical rightists
  • Both were responses to the same failures of the systematic mode
  • Both retained the systematic mode’s commitment to universalism
  • Both borrowed from 1800s Romanticism
  • Monism and dualism both necessarily turn into the other when pressed

As a consequence, the dualist counterculture tacitly accepted and promoted several of the monist counterculture’s erasures of boundaries:

  • between the personal/private and the political/public
  • between ethics, religion, politics, and psychology
  • between religions and sects

The two countercultures were in violent, albeit unstated, agreement on these points. They were also, I believe, disastrously wrong: these boundaries are nebulous but necessary. This shared error explains many of the social, cultural, and psychological problems we face today. I will explain that, bit by bit, throughout “How meaning fell apart.”

Particularly, “Renegotiating self and society” addresses the collapse of the private/public distinction; “The personal is political” the collapse of that boundary; and “Rejecting rationality, reinventing religion, reconfiguring the self” covers the collapse of the distinction between psychology and religion.

The two remaining sections of this page cover the collapse of the boundary between politics and religion, and between ethics and religion, in the dualist counterculture.

Unifying politics and religion

The unity of the political right with Evangelical Christianity—and with particular views on sexual morality—now seems obvious, necessary, and eternal. But it was new, sudden, shocking, and deliberately engineered in the mid-1970s. For outsiders, this was (and remains) the main manifestation of the dualist counterculture.

For decades before the 1970s, Evangelicals were socially marginal, apolitical, and divided into innumerable small hostile sects. They had come together in the 1920s in support of Prohibition and against teaching evolution. The 1925 Scopes “monkey trial” made Fundamentalism look ridiculous, and Evangelicals retreated from public life in humiliation. After the Second World War, some re-entered politics—mainly on the left. Difficult as it may be to imagine now, as late as the 1960s, the majority of Evangelicals opposed capitalism, nationalism, and militarism, and supported women’s suffrage and abortion rights. The social activism of leftist Evangelicals in the 1950s-60s began to blur the boundary between ethics, politics, and religion, and was a prototype for the 1970s-80s Religious Right.3

Evangelicalism’s merger with the political right was primarily authored by Francis and Frank Schaeffer, whose extraordinary story I recount on the next page. Francis was a socially liberal Fundamentalist theologian who led a hippie commune. His teenage son Frank somehow conceived a passionate concern for the rights of the unborn. Abortion had been an exclusively Catholic and mainly left issue; Protestants and Republicans mostly considered it acceptable even up to the time of natural birth.4

Frank convinced his reluctant5 father to campaign against abortion. Their roadshow was unexpectedly, hugely popular, and started to convert Evangelicals to the cause.

Republican Party operatives took note. Although the Party had long supported abortion rights, in 1972 they tried to appeal to Catholics (mainly Democrats) by reversing their position. That failed—but the Schaeffers’ popularity made them realize the same strategy might work on Evangelicals (also majority left). They reached out to the Schaeffers,6 and soon cemented a deal of mutual cooptation. The Schaeffers would deliver Evangelical votes to the Party; the Party would make opposition to abortion an ideological centerpiece for the political Right. (Frank Schaeffer later said that their alliance with the Right was essentially an accident, which he came to regret.7 They could just as easily allied with the Democratic Party, and in fact the Schaeffers’ socially liberal views would have been a better fit there.)

The Moral Majority, the most famous dualist-counterculture institution, was founded on Francis Schaeffer’s advice. Jerry Falwell, its public face, had firmly believed that politics and religion didn’t mix.8 Schaeffer changed Falwell’s mind—and convinced him to make abortion the Moral Majority’s central issue. Paul Weyrich co-founded the Moral Majority; he provided the political, organizational, and financial backing. His expertise was creating think tanks and lobbying groups that connected money from big business donors with economically conservative political ideology.

The Schaeffer/Weyrich strategy worked astonishingly well. On the religious side, within a few years, fervent commitment to the anti-abortion cause became the single-issue “badge” of membership in the entire political-religious dualist counterculture.9 It is not credible that tens of millions of Americans who had zero interest in abortion in 1975 discovered deep concern for the well-being of fetuses by 1980. Instead, public opposition to abortion became the main symbol, or shibboleth, for good standing in a counterculture whose actual appeal lay elsewhere.10

On the political side, the Moral Majority was widely considered responsible for the election of Ronald Reagan as President in 1980.11 Reagan ran against the incumbent Democratic President, Jimmy Carter. Carter was the first “born again” President, and had taken the Evangelical vote in 1976. However, despite his personal opposition to abortion, Carter refused to make it a political issue, which Evangelicals saw as a betrayal. Reagan was not personally particularly religious, had been pro-choice only a few years earlier, and did not stress social issues in his campaign. He was primarily an economic conservative and nationalist, and in office delivered almost nothing the Moral Majority wanted. However, by 1980, the Republican Party had become the Evangelical Party, so none of that mattered.

Unifying religion by replacing piety with “moral values”

Evangelical Christians had long been split among numerous separatist, schismatic sects. Most were intensely hostile to Catholics and Jews, and fought each other over arcane metaphysical distinctions that were largely forgotten by the end of the decade.12

Francis Schaeffer not only united Evangelicals across sectarian lines, he also created durable alliances between them and conservative Catholics, Mormons, and Jews.13 Under Schaeffer’s influence, Falwell—a Southern Baptist—made the Moral Majority ecumenical: Weyrich was Catholic, and its third founder was Howard Phillips, a Jewish Republican politician.14 Falwell increasingly downplayed his extremist moral positions, including his formerly overt racism.15

Forging a mass movement required dropping most of the traditional religious content of Evangelicalism—because that was extreme, incomprehensible, and unacceptable to nearly everyone. And anyway, no two Evangelical theologians could agree on it!

The new dualist counterculture replaced traditional doctrine and piety with “values” and “experiences.” It was easy to get broad agreement on those. I’ll discuss the new Christian “experiences” in “Rejecting rationality, reinventing religion, reconfiguring the self”; and “values” here.

Substituting “values” for traditional Christianity was the culmination of a process that had been underway for most of a century. By the late 1800s, it was obvious that much of what the Bible said was wrong. Mainline Protestants adopted a liberal, modernist theology according to which the important thing about Christianity was its humanistic ethical teachings, not its metaphysical beliefs. Fundamentalism, in reaction, insisted that everything in the Bible was literally true. In the 1920s, internal conflict between modernists and fundamentalists split most American Protestant sects.

The religious leaders of the dualist counterculture were Fundamentalists. A few decades earlier, they had taught not only Biblical inerrancy, but also an ascetic moral code that forbade smoking, drinking, dancing, watching movies or plays, listening to secular music, and all “worldly pursuits” (including politics). These sins all lead straight to damnation and eternal hellfire! This was a non-starter for a 1970s mass movement.

In the counterculture, it was adequate to say you believed everything in the Bible, even if you had little idea what was in there, and in practice disagreed with much of it. The main thing was “believing” in Jesus as your personal savior.

It was also adequate to “have values,” rather than conforming to a moral code.16 “Values” were opinions about things other people did. The most important values were condemning abortion and “the homosexual lifestyle.” (Both were non-traditional: homosexuality was not a significant issue before the 1970s; and, as I mentioned, Evangelicals had mostly considered abortion acceptable.)

The “values” innovation effectively replicated the Christian Modernist move of replacing religious piety with ethics, but went a step further: opinions replaced both belief and morality. “Having” an opinion means stating it forcefully, or assenting to it, when ritually required. It does not necessarily involve belief, in the ordinary sense that you believe your car needs a wash. You must “believe” in Creation Science rather than evolution—but since it has no consequence for your everyday life, this is often no more than performing a public tribal loyalty oath.17

I’m not taking sides here; this was equally true of the monist counterculture, in which you were also required to “believe” endless absurdities—that is, to agree to them in public.

Further reading

I started this page by recounting my “peculiar realization” that the Moral Majority was structurally and functionally similar to the hippie counterculture it opposed. It took a year to convince myself that this was accurate and significant. At first it seemed probably mistaken; then likely an accidental and superficial resemblance. But eventually, I decided it was an exciting and remarkably clever discovery.

Turns out, it’s old hat. In subsequent reading, I found that many historians, and even some members of the movement, have pointed out the countercultural nature of the 1980s Religious Right. They have traced many structural parallels and historical connections between the two countercultures.

Describing the two countercultures in terms of monism and dualism does seem to be new. These categories are important in metaphysics, but have mostly not been applied to culture, ethics, or politics before.

The two best overview articles I’ve found on the web analyze the similarity between the two countercultures from a libertarian, subcultural point of view:

Libertarians, and most Gen X subculturalists, stand outside the usual framing of the culture war. They are perhaps better able to regard both sides dispassionately, and to see their commonalities, rather than identifying with one against the other.

In writing this page, I made heavy use of Axel R. Schäfer’s Countercultural Conservatives: American Evangelicalism from the Postwar Revival to the New Christian Right, an academic history.18

Ross Douthat’s Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics is an excellent history of the transformation of American Christianity during the countercultural era.

The next page, on the Schaeffer family, references various sources I also found useful while writing this one.

  • 1. I have researched the history of only the American dualist counterculture. I am not sure whether other Western countries developed anything similar (whereas the American monist counterculture was certainly influential elsewhere). Islamic fundamentalism is also a dualist counterculture, and structurally similar to the American one.
  • 2. I find this borrowing extremely interesting, because it reveals intellectual and emotional commonalities that were deliberately obscured by both countercultures. Although I’m tempted to detail the history here, not everyone is as geeky about such things as I am. If you’d like to learn more, try Countercultural Conservatives, pp. 93-101, 123, 132-6, et passim. Also, Hippies of the Religious Right is apparently entirely about this, but I haven’t read it.
  • 3. See Countercultural Conservatives: American Evangelicalism from the Postwar Revival to the New Christian Right for a detailed history.
  • 4. For a brief popular discussion, see “When evangelicals were pro-choice.” For an academic treatment, Linda Greenhouse and Reva B. Siegel, “Before (and After) Roe v. Wade,” Yale Law Journal 2028:2011. For context, Countercultural Conservatives and Sex, Mom, and God. From the last, pp. 128-9: “Dr. W. A. Criswell (a two-term president of the Southern Baptist Convention)… was on record saying he didn’t think life began until a baby took his or her first breath.”
  • 5. “I don’t want to be identified with some Catholic issue. I’m not putting my reputation on the line for them!” Dad shouted back. “So you won’t speak out because it’s a ‘Catholic issue?’” “What does abortion have to do with art and culture? I’m known as an intellectual, not for this sort of political thing!” shouted Dad. Crazy For God, pp. 285-6.
  • 6. Billy Zeoli, Gerald Ford’s Whitehouse chaplain, was the first main go-between. Congressman Jack Kemp was an early close ally. Eventually the Schaeffers worked with most of the most powerful Republicans, including Presidents Ford, Reagan, and Bush.
  • 7. In his fascinating Crazy For God.
  • 8. Quoted from “People & Ideas: Jerry Falwell”; God in America. Also there: “In his famous 1964 sermon, ‘Ministers and Marches,’ Falwell declared, ‘Preachers are not called to be politicians, but soul winners….’ His remarks were widely interpreted as a rebuke to the political activism of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.” Similarly Billy Graham, who became another major spokesperson for the Religious Right. “Most evangelical leaders, following Billy Graham’s lead, weren’t interested in ‘going political.’ When [Francis Schaeffer] asked Billy why he wasn’t taking a stand on abortion, Billy answered that he had been burned by getting too close to Nixon and was never going to poke his head over the ramparts of the ‘I-only-preach-the-gospel’ trench again. He said he didn’t want to be ‘political.’” Crazy For God, p. 290.
  • 9. I explained moral badges in “Ethics is advertising.” My discussion there was based on Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior.
  • 10. Exactly why the abortion strategy worked so well, and the precise appeal of dualist counterculture, remains somewhat mysterious. I have read many plausible partial explanations, but no convincing synthesis. Most authors agree that the desire to make sex more dangerous for people of other socioeconomic classes is central to American “social conservatism.” Research by Jason Weeden and his collaborators suggests American religiosity is based on practical benefits for a many-child reproductive strategy. A key paper is “Religious attendance as reproductive support,” Evolution and Human Behavior 29 (2008) 327–334. His The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind: How Self-Interest Shapes Our Opinions and Why We Won’t Admit It, written for a non-academic audience, lays out implications for electoral politics. I think Weeden’s work is on the right track, but there’s much it still doesn’t explain. For an interesting—albeit inconclusive and unconvincing—meta-discussion, see Bethany Moreton, “Why Is There So Much Sex in Christian Conservatism and Why Do So Few Historians Care Anything about It?,” The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 75, No. 3 (August 2009), pp. 717-738. Winning line: “Sodomites are a traditionally underrepresented market for abortion services.”
  • 11. Historians have later questioned whether the Moral Majority’s support actually was critical, or if Reagan would have been elected anyway. For much interesting discussion, see Doug Banwart’s “Jerry Falwell, the Rise of the Moral Majority, and the 1980 Election,” Western Illinois Historical Review Vol. V, Spring 2013. Also Religion and the Culture Wars: Dispatches from the Front, pp. 20ff.
  • 12. Among the most important were diverging dispensationalist millennialisms. I’ve spent many hours trying to figure out what, if anything, this dispute was about, and completely failed. However, it’s charmingly reminiscent of the filioque schism. It’s also entertaining and instructive to compare the Wikipedia article on sectarian millennialisms with its article on heavy metal genres, which display similar fissiparous tendencies. More about that when we get to the evolutionary dynamics of subcultures.
  • 13. This despite his earlier decades in the trenches as a member of a Presbyterian sub-sub-sub-sect fighting holy wars against other Presbyterian sub-sub-sub-sects with infinitesimally different theological views.
  • 14. Separatist Fundamentalists denounced the Moral Majority for this inclusiveness.
  • 15. For decades, his main moral cause had been support for racial segregation, but by the late ’70s that was no longer respectable. The Moral Majority did make opposition to the Supreme Court’s Bob Jones University anti-segregation decision its second-most-important cause, notionally on religious freedom grounds. Ironically, the ungrateful University declared the Moral Majority “Satanic,” “holding that it was a step toward the apostate one-world church and government body as it would cross the line from a political alliance to a religious one between true Christians and the non-born-again, as forbidden by their interpretation of the Bible.” (Quote from the Wikipedia article on Jerry Falwell.)
  • 16. I suspect this was because by the 1970s, everyone from secular humanists to Fundamentalists was in nearly complete agreement on what acts are moral or immoral. An earlier chapter discusses this in terms of “ethical ease” and “ethical agreement”; morality was a solved problem.
  • 17. I’m not suggesting Fundamentalists secretly disbelieve what they assert in public, only that belief in the ordinary sense does not enter into it.
  • 18. Schäfer is not related to Francis Schaeffer, as far as I know.

The hippie family who invented contemporary conservatism

Cover of Frank Schaeffer’s Sex Mom and God

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

The Schaeffer family created the American Religious Right. Without the Schaeffers, more famous campaigners like Jerry Falwell, Billy Graham, and Anita Bryant would never have reached mainstream political audiences.

The Schaeffers were hippies. Too late, they realized they had created a monster. I found their story extraordinarily compelling: a tragedy in the mode of Ancient Greek drama.

There will be two parts to this page. The first is the remarkable tale of their lives and works.

The second concerns Francis Schaeffer’s analysis of the history of meaningness—which is closely parallel to the book you are reading here now. We came to many of the same conclusions. I feel a close intellectual kinship with Schaeffer, despite our very different paths and personalities, and very different ultimate commitments.

When all is done, when all the alternatives have been explored, “not many men are in the room”—that is, although world-views have many variations, there are not many basic world-views or basic presuppositions. —Francis Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live

In fact, he found that the three “men left in the room” are nihilism (with its close allies such as materialism and existentialism); monist mysticism; and dualist eternalism—that is, Fundamentalist Christianity, in his case. These are my “Big Threestance combinations—the three “basic world views.” His analyses and rejections of the first two were accurate, so he was left with only the third. “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

I haven’t written the page yet. If you are interested in learning more from other sources, some I recommend are:

Francis Schaeffer,” a brief biography. (The Wikipedia entries for the Schaeffers are all lousy, unfortunately.)

“The dissatisfaction of Francis Schaeffer” is a good introduction to his life and thought, which appeared as a six-part series in Christianity Today, where it is paywalled. It appears here for free (amidst other articles).

Frank Schaeffer’s Crazy For God and Sex, Mom, and God are un-put-downable accounts of his parents, his early life, and his role in making abortion the central American political issue. The books are fast-paced, fascinating, hilarious, easy to read, and moving. Not to be taken uncritically, but the publicly-checkable facts seem reliable.

Two good academic studies—I have read only part of each—are Schaeffer on the Christian Life: Countercultural Spirituality and Francis Schaeffer and the Shaping of Evangelical America.

Renegotiating self and society

Christians against greed: protest rally
Image courtesy Ben Cumming

The failure of social and psychological systems propelled the 1960s-80s countercultures. Societies had required selves to conform to modern, unnatural systems of employment, government, and religion. These arrangements were invented and imposed with little regard for individuals or local communities.

They were founded on economic, political, and theological theories that were mainly abstract and rationalistic. They ignored innate human needs, desires, and proclivities. It’s a wonder they worked for as long as they did.

These obsolete modern ideologies included, for example, Taylorism, the Westphalian nation-state, and the Victorian family.

  • Scientific Taylorism was the dominant theory of industrial management. It explicitly treated workers as machines whose performance should be optimized with intensive management controls.
  • A state is legitimate, according to the modern Westphalian international system, if it rules a nation. A “nation” is defined as a set of people who share a single culture and social system. Rulers, therefore, did their best to force uniform systems on as many people as possible. This typically involved destroying most social traditions and institutions intermediate in scope between the nuclear family and the state.
  • The ideology of the traditional family developed in the 1800s, and in that century was mainly restricted to English-speaking middle class Protestants. (So it was not traditional for the working class, or for many American immigrants.) Its precisely-defined gender and parent/child roles, emphasis on a sharp division between the nuclear family and outside world, and strict life-long monogamy are historically unusual. They don’t function well for everyone.

The crisis of the self showed that organizing one’s psychology to systematic requirements, with a hard public/private boundary, was unworkable for many people. The fragmentation and isolation of communities and individuals was intolerable. After spending the 1950s whistling past the graveyard of systematicity, renegotiating the relationship between self and society became obviously urgent in the mid-1960s.

The previous half-century had developed two alternatives, totalitarianism and existentialism, which were pathological extremes of collectivism and individualism. The countercultures attempted new, less absolutist renegotiations of the self/society relationship, which blurred the hard line between the two. However, both countercultures also drew on both totalitarianism and existentialism, and affirmed the values of both individualism and collectivism in ways that were incoherent and still extreme. This tended to heighten the self/society conflict, even while attempting to defuse it.

The countercultures failed because they retained systematic constraints—especially, universalism. They assumed that there must be one right way for individuals to be, and one right model for society, and the two must fit together harmoniously. Rather than challenging systematicity as such, they proposed new, alternative, universalist, eternalist, anti-rational systems. That is, countercultures, as I have defined them.

Reforming self and reforming society

Free speech protest rally
Image courtesy Jason

Both countercultures wrestled with the self/society conflict at both ends: at the self end through psychology and religion, and at the society end through “values-based” political action.

On the whole, the monist (“hippie”) counterculture wanted to reform the public sphere to better match private proclivities; the dualist (“Moral Majority”) counterculture wanted to reform private souls to better match public morality. So the monist counterculture was more influenced by existentialism, and the dualist one by totalitarianism, although both drew on both (as we shall see).

In both countercultures, some activists argued that individual spiritual transformation was a prerequisite to social change, and others argued that social reform was a necessary support to constructing better selves. Despite internal conflict between these wings, both movements adopted the Romantic idea that personal change can quasi-magically fix society by the propagation of good vibrations. Both also adopted the Romantic idea that if only society were properly organized, everyone would live together in happy harmony.

The next two pages, “Rejecting rationality, reinventing religion, reconfiguring the self” and “The personal is political,” describe both countercultures’ reform efforts at these two ends. Inevitably, they overlap to some extent, because both movements’ program was to merge them.

The remainder of this page is an overview of these programs, in terms of particular problems in the self/society interface and their attempted solutions. Some worked reasonably well, and were adopted as stable policy by governments; others were harmful or just obviously impractical. I will sketch the vicissitudes of these innovations in later modes: subcultural, atomized, and fluid.

Overall strategy

Overall, both countercultures sought to replace the artificial, seemingly-arbitrary social and personal requirements of the systematic mode with ones they considered natural. Unfortunately, their ideas about what would be natural were, in both cases, completely crazy. (In my opinion; but also this was widely acknowledged once the countercultural era ended.) Because both countercultures were eternalist, they took their insane ideologies as absolute and universal, and so tended toward harmful totalitarianism.

Replacing artificial systematic requirements with natural ones remains a popular goal. It’s a decent impulse, but unfortunately there is currently no alternative to artificial social systems capable of supporting a global population of billions. The future, fluid mode must find ways to simulate natural (choiceless) roles while keeping artificial systems running—at least until we develop some other alternative.

As I mentioned, both countercultures tried to blur the public/private boundary as a way of addressing alienation and isolation. This was a step in the right direction, but I will suggest that one reason the countercultures failed is that they offered no structural change in the self/society relationship. The development of subsocieties—structures intermediate in scale between family and state—was a major contribution of the subcultural mode.

Both countercultures considered rationality and objectivity the source of modern meaninglessness, materialism, and the loss of the sacred. Both rejected rationality, embraced subjectivism, and tried to evert subjective meanings to re-enchant the world; to restore its inherent sacred meaning. This was extremely harmful, I think. I hope the fluid mode can recognize meaning as real but neither objective nor subjective; and rationality as a valuable tool, but not an absolute principle to be worshipped.

Technologies of the self

Acting according to formal roles, as demanded by systematic societies, is unnatural. If you develop a systematic self, it can be comfortable and empowering, but for most people formal roles feel alienating. Why should artificial, systematic demands take precedence over your personal feelings and your relationships? Your public self feels false: mere play-acting of an arbitrary, often humiliating or incomprehensible script.

Both countercultures adopted the Romantic conception of a true self. That is an idealization of the private self, freed from arbitrary public conventions. Not the private self as it is, because that is neurotic and sinful and false, but the self reformed and perfected. You should find your true self, and then you should be true to it. You should speak and act from that self, regardless of social judgement, because it would comport naturally with the correct social organization. This is “sincerity” and “authenticity”—key values of both countercultures.

There is no true self, so this approach was mainly harmful. The atomized mode effectively abandoned “authenticity,” because it is obviously impossible to be “true” to an atomized self.

Modern employment is dehumanizing. (Deliberately so, under Taylorism.) The countercultures developed personal and small-group practices for personal emotional fulfillment, self expression, and “finding yourself.” These seem to me on the right track, but had limited success, mainly due to universalism—the denial of diversity. The subcultures made their greatest contribution here: expressive communal practices for “DIY” exploration of psychologies, aesthetic culture, and social models.

In complex, modern societies, most people have multiple formal roles, in additional to natural (biological) ones. The contrasts between roles cause internal fragmentation; you internalize external ways of being as “multiple selves.” Conflicts among them are disruptive and painful in both the communal and systematic modes, which expect internal coherence.

The countercultures promised new technologies for re-unifying the self. These didn’t work. The subcultural mode began to develop ways of managing a fragmented self; for reconciling and switching among selves. The fluid mode finds internal diversity comfortable and empowering.

Many counterculturalists tried to make membership in one of the countercultures the unifying theme of their identity. They considered themselves first and foremost conservative Christians or liberal New Agers; and only after that insurance claims managers, Iowans, or softball players. Their community was not their town, church, or company, but the brotherhood of all participants in their counterculture. This resonated with universalism: both countercultures treated all their members as equivalent. Countercultural identity didn’t work well, because a nation-scaled group is too large a group to provide functional community; and because each counterculture merely suppressed and denied its internal diversity.

Ecstatic experience is the natural antidote to rigid social requirements. That was banned in the systematic era. Modernized, rationalized Christianity had mostly also eliminated experience of the sacred and transcendent, emphasizing this-worldly humanistic ethics. Both countercultures produced new religions and quasi-religions emphasizing ecstatic practices, “direct experience,” and the supernatural. I think this was an important step forward, although the details were mostly wrong.

Social reform

Both countercultures tried to reorient society away from formal, systematic roles toward natural ones: family, unstructured friendships, and local communities. This was the obvious response to the painful gap between the private and public selves. However, it represents a partial reversion toward the choiceless mode, which isn’t capable of sustaining contemporary civilization. That could eventually become disastrous.

Both countercultures sought to revise systematic social norms to make them more natural. The monist counterculture thought humanistic, egalitarian norms would be more natural. The dualist counterculture thought godly, hierarchical norms would be more natural. This divergence led to the destructive and unwinnable culture war.

In the face of mid-century anomie—the breakdown in public morality—both countercultures tried to strengthen social norms as well as revising them. Their reforms emphasized “ethics” and “values,” which fused with, or even replaced, politics. Notoriously, the two countercultures disagreed violently about military and reproductive “values,” which also fed the culture war.

“Family values” were—and are—the central culture war issue, actually. Both countercultures agreed that “traditional” families weren’t working as they should. The monist response was to dissolve or replace the model; the dualist counterculture tried to strengthen, support, and universalize it. During the subcultural era, American society reluctantly accepted a compromise allowing diverse sexual and family models, but upholding the “traditional” one as ideal.

Both countercultures recognized the value of local communities, which the systematic mode had eroded. Both invented new local community models: monist communes and dualist megachurches. Communes failed quickly; megachurches remain vigorous. The subcultural mode developed subsocieties as another new model for community, which unfortunately did not survive atomization. The atomized mode provides virtual but limited community through internet social networks. Overall, the problem of community is still mainly unsolved.

Rejecting rationality, reinventing religion, reconfiguring the self

Pentecostal snake handlers
Pentecostal snake handlers (Mark 16:17-18)

Rejecting rationality was the central conceptual move of both countercultures. Rationality was a foundation of the systematic mode. When the systematic mode conclusively failed, rationality got the blame.

Both countercultures explicitly abandoned rationality and adopted anti-rational religions: “Eastern” and “New Age” on the monist side; fundamentalist and charismatic on the dualist one. All these new religious movements discarded traditional social norms in favor of inner transformations supposedly wrought by “spiritual” practices.

Summary

In the systematic mode, you create a rational, systematic self. A systematic self has a clear boundary, so it is not flooded by the emotions and expectations of others. You act as the administrator of an internal world of principles, projects, and formal roles. A systematic self is far more sophisticated than a choiceless one, and is a prerequisite to participating effectively in a systematic society.

Unfortunately, this sort of self is unnatural. Living as one sometimes exposes contradictions between systematicity and human nature. It can give the feeling of being a tiny cog in a vast, uncaring, meaningless machine—the “Iron Cage” of rationalized bureaucracy. When a society imposes systematicity rigidly, it becomes psychologically intolerable for many people.

The countercultures demanded to renegotiate the relationship between self and society. Both began by rejecting rationality, and the systematic principles, projects, and formal roles that rationality justified.

I defined countercultures as “new, alternative, universalist, eternalist, anti-rational systems.” The only distinctive part of this was the anti-rationalism.1 “New, alternative, universalist, eternalist, rational systems” had been tried repeatedly during the systematic era. These included, for instance, capitalism, communism, socialism, nationalism, fascism, democracy, Freudianism, and existentialism.2

The systematic mode used rationality to maintain eternalism: belief in fixed meanings. Having abandoned rationality, both countercultures turned to religion as a foundation for eternalism. Mainstream Christianity had been rationalized in the 1800s, so the countercultures constructed alternatives: the New Age in the monist one, and a reworked Evangelical Christianity in the dualist one.

The countercultural religions developed ecstatic, quasi-magical, anti-rational technologies of self-transformation. These aimed to remake the self to strengthen it against the depredations of systematic society and—particularly in the dualist counterculture—to adapt it to better conform to systematic demands. They also promised emotional, social, and pragmatic this-world benefits, whereas traditional religion emphasized self-denial, devotion to God, and other-world salvation.

The two countercultures tried to solve many of the same problems, drawing from the same limited set of pre-existing cultural tools. Superficially opposed, they attempted many similar solutions. I find these similarities remarkable, but the point of this page is not to draw the interesting historical parallels. Rather: we mostly still have these same problems—although subsequent modes of meaningness have contributed some additional tools toward solving them. Understanding the countercultures’ attempts, and how they failed, may help us now.

Overall, anti-rationalism was a disaster, I think. The self/society relationship did need extensive renegotiation—and still does. However, we can no longer live without rational social systems, and we are diminished as human beings if we lose the ability to create rational selves. The countercultures picked the wrong target, and the alternative, anti-rational systems they built were profoundly dysfunctional. When their failure became obvious, the modern world ended. We live in the wreckage, called “postmodernity.”

All is not lost. Rationality still works—just not as an ultimate foundation. Rationality does not actually contradict meaningfulness, only eternalism. The fluid mode needs to reclaim rationality, while recognizing its nebulosity and limits.

The remaining sections of this page explain:

  • Why the countercultures rejected rationality: to rescue meaning
  • How they constructed new religions as alternate foundations: reviving Romanticism
  • The form of those new religions: subjective individualism
  • The religions’ promises to reform the self: to deliver unity, authenticity, and ecstasy
  • Their promises of material benefits: health and wealth
  • An assessment of their legacy: a disaster, but one we are recovering from

Rationalism and its discontents

Science: ruining everything since 1543

Rationality ruins everything. As you know. As everyone has known for hundreds of years.

Back in the choiceless mode, all things were charged with inherent meaning, mountains were inhabited by benevolent and terrifying gods, and you always knew what you were supposed to do. Then rationality came along and pointed out that meanings can’t be objective, there are no spooks, and you can’t derive ought from is. And the world was disenchanted, emptied of meaning, and turned into mere matter.

Charge of the Light Brigade

But wait! The heroic Romantics, on their magnificent steeds of poetry, mounted the counter-charge, plumes flying from their noble helms, against the machine guns of materialism. Meaning, they cried, was subjective, revealed by emotion, intuition, and aesthetic appreciation. We can re-enchant the world in the mystic artistic unity of our True Selves with Absolute Reality.

Alas, in mundane modernity, superior firepower defeats valor. The existentialists, seemingly the last ragged company of Romantics, fell, ignobly, in the late 1950s. Rationality demonstrated that meaning cannot be subjective either; Romanticism inevitably collapses into mere nihilism.

Meanwhile, rationality had turned its guns inward. During the first half of the century, rational certainty destroyed itself—in philosophy, mathematics, and science. Not only had it obliterated all other sources of meaning, rationality finally demonstrated its own meaninglessness.

Then what? asked the founders of the countercultures, in the 1960s. Rationality had been exhausted. All possible rational bases for systems had been tried, and had failed. Also, scientific rationality was apparently to blame for all the Twentieth Century horrors: the World Wars, loss of Christian faith, rampant materialism, ecological devastation, abortion, and nuclear weapons. Anyway, meaning obviously does exist, so if rationality says it’s neither objective nor subjective, it must just be wrong.

Reinventing religion: anti-rationalism as the cure

Well, this is easy! Reject rationality, and recover meaning from its most salient source: religion. (In fact, rational analysis shows that eternalism is wrong. If eternalism is misunderstood as the only defense of meaning, any serious attempt to rescue it must reject rationality.)

Unfortunately, Mainline Protestantism—America’s dominant religion—could not do the job. It had been modernized, remade for compatibility with the dictates of rationality, and thereby drained of most of its meaning. The 1920s fundamentalist vs. modernist war was about this; the fundamentalists lost then. But they were right, in some sense. The modernists were on a slippery slope to secularism, and Mainline Protestantism became a hollow shell of hypocrisy, pretense, and going through the motions.

In the 1950s, religious commitment, despite its high levels, was superficial and largely a matter of vogue rather than conviction. Most self-proclaimed believers had little knowledge of the teachings of the Bible. To be a member of a mainline church was more a matter of adhering to convention born of the desire for social belonging. Churches were functioning mainly as social and civic clubs.3

So both countercultures constructed new, anti-rational religious movements to provide the meaningfulness Christianity had lost. The monist counterculture rejected Christianity in favor of “Eastern religion” and New Age nonsense. (Both these were mostly vintage-1800 German Romantic Idealism in disguise.) The dualist counterculture replaced rationalized mainline Christianity with anti-rational fundamentalist, charismatic, and dispensationalist alternatives.4

All these new religions promoted wacky mythologies: reincarnated space-faring priests from Atlantis bearing monist mystical wisdom; or the dispensationalist Tribulation and Rapture that separate the sheep from the goats. Such myths are defiant statements of anti-rationalism, putting you unambiguously outside the pale of the mainstream systematic worldview. Once you have publicly asserted your belief in holistic chakra rebalancing therapy, or young earth creationism, you are fully committed to simply ignoring everything rationality says. These “beliefs” are shibboleths that demonstrate your allegiance to the countercultural tribe, and rejection of the previous, systematic mode.

In this page’s analysis, what matters in the new religions is not their “beliefs,” but their practices.5 In particular, this page looks at the goals of those practices, which was to re-form the self, and to cure the body by curing the spirit. The efficacy of these quasi-magical technologies of personal transformation and faith healing was dubious. Having already committed to believing nonsense made it easier to go along with new absurdities.

Although the myths were untrue, they were at least partly functional in keeping new versions of systematic eternalism going. Despite anti-rationalism, the overall structure of justification was left largely intact in the countercultural mode. The countercultures were still more-or-less coherent systems, and still mostly made sense. As systematic reform movements, they retained legacy “becauses,” left over from systematic mode at its peak, and added new ones. However, there were now also unapologetic gaps that no one felt a need to fill, other than with emotional fantasies.

(Three decades later, in the atomized mode, structure finally disintegrated, coherence was lost, and nothing made sense other than in an emotional, associative way.)

The subjective turn and the end of “organized religion”

External, systematic duties are central to traditional religion. For 1920s fundamentalists, religious practice meant sitting on a hard bench, listening to sermons on ascetic morality, sin, and damnation. By the 1970s, nobody wanted that anymore.

The countercultures’ new religious movements were all about me. They took a “subjective turn,” toward internal personal mental states, particularly non-rational ones such as emotions and “experiences.”6 This was explicit in the monist counterculture; probably that is so widely known that I need not detail it here. On the dualist side, some Christian leaders resisted the subjective turn, but many adopted it covertly, and overall the Christian Right mostly succumbed in time. This is less well-known, so I’ll sketch some main aspects.7

The subjective turn accelerated centuries-old trends: Protestant interiority, Enlightenment individualism, and Romantic emotionalism. Especially the last: the countercultures developed a renewed Romanticism, which simply ignored rationality instead of fighting it. (I will trace the historical roots of both countercultures in Romanticism later.)

The religions of both countercultures downplayed objective, external moral criteria. They replaced rules and judgements with a view of ethics as flowing from the individual conscience, “being authentic to your true Self,” subjective feelings of compassion, and “doing what feels right in your heart.” And so: “Phrased in the language of psychology, sinfulness was discussed in terms of therapeutic maladjustment, rather than as the transgression of divine commands.”8

Countercultural Christianity retained some of the rhetoric of moral absolutism from its 1920s Fundamentalist roots. This seems to have been a major aspect of its appeal. There was much talk about Biblical inerrancy, and the Bible as the source of morals; but, for the most part, the counterculture was morally undemanding in practice.9 It placed an extraordinary, almost exclusive emphasis on sexual morality; and particularly condemned sexual transgressions of sorts that its adherents were unlikely to be tempted to.10 This enabled enjoyably self-righteous judgement of Those Horrible People In The Other Tribe (monist counterculturalists).

More generally, the specifics of traditional religion were unappealing, and so they were simply dropped. (This, at the same time the Christian Right was marketing itself as the guardian of tradition.) Subjective individualism was incompatible with Christian doctrine. Most supposed Christians were mainly ignorant of the basic tenets of their religion, and would reject them if they knew about them.11 So doctrine and liturgy were downplayed, with only a few key points retained.12

Subjective individualism was also incompatible with hierarchical authority and institutional traditions, so those disintegrated.13 This was consonant with the American individualism and Protestant anti-clericalism that had allowed for sectarian innovation for centuries. However, the countercultural era took it to new extremes: a “choose-your-own-Jesus mentality” or “cafeteria Christianity.”14

The innumerable Protestant sects had mainly defined their differences in terms of arcane details of abstract theology. Once everyone stopped preaching that stuff, the boundaries collapsed.15 Everyone hates “organized religion”, so countercultural Christianity developed a new social mode, featuring non-denominational churches; decentralized, unstructured communities; and ecumenical parachurch organizations whose lines of authority mimicked secular NGOs rather than traditional religious hierarchy. These achieved unprecedented economy of scale by appealing to Evangelical Christians regardless of sectarian affiliation. Generally, too, they gave people what they wanted, rather than demanding of people what traditional religion required.

Re-enchanting the self

Both countercultures saw the misery of modern life as due partly to inadequate selves. Both used religion as a therapeutic tool for re-forming the self to better cope. Both promoted personal transformation through magical, anti-rational, and supernatural methods. Both promised ecstatic personal fulfillment through direct experience of the divine. Both promised substantial material benefits, to be delivered after the self was properly restructured.

Both promised a better self, featuring self-actualization, self-affirmation, self-awareness, self-compassion, self-confidence, self-definition, self-discovery, self-esteem, self-expression, self-fulfillment, self-help, self-purification, self-realization, self-revelation, and self-transcendence.

Evangelicalism aligned Christian faith with the Holy Grail of the affluent society: self-realization. Unlike the classic bourgeois Protestantism of the 19th century, whose moral teachings emphasized avoidance of worldly temptation, the revitalized version promised empowerment, joy, and personal fulfillment. A godly life was once understood as grim defiance of sinful urges; now it was the key to untold blessings.16

In the face of the difficulty of conforming to an objective moral code, the countercultures sought to instill subjective compassion (for one’s own tribe, at least): an ethics of emotionalism. A moral person was now a happy, self-aware, psychologically well-adjusted one.

The Puritan virtues, required to conform to harsh external norms, were quietly dropped: self-abnegation, self-denial, self-discipline, self-doubt, self-reliance, self-sufficiency, and self-surrender.

Promises of unity, authenticity, and ecstasy

The modern contrast between the systematic/public and communal/private worlds produced fractured selves, because you had to be different people in different contexts. Both countercultures sought to dissolve the public/private boundary, and to heal the divided self. In fact, they promised that the self could be unified altogether, replacing the broken ego with the True Self. That might unify even further: with the divine.17

This required supernatural technologies—which the countercultures promised to supply.

Where the systematic mainstream culture required hypocrisy, the countercultures promised authenticity. Where the systematic economy imposed brutal regimentation, the countercultures promised to restore spontaneity and freedom. Finding the authentic, spontaneous True Self was a major project,18 for which both countercultures offered magical tools.

In the face of the disenchantment of the world, and loss of religious certainty, the countercultures promoted ecstatic personal experience of the sacred.

Epistemologically, evangelical revivalism, with its reliance on the immediacy of the divine, faith in intuitive knowledge, pursuit of self-purification and holy living, and desire for a profound personal conversion experience, resembled closely the spiritual aspirations of the sixties movements. Rooted in transcendentalist and romantic conceptions of knowledge, countercultural thinking regarded truth as the result of intense, unmediated, and pre-rational experiences that dissolved the rationally constructed dualism of subject and object and revealed the unity behind fragmented existence.19

Both countercultures developed technologies for provoking altered states of consciousness, or intense emotional engagement, in which adherents found—or thought they found—access to the numinous.

Psychedelic drugs, understood as providing transcendent non-rational insight as well as orgiastic ecstasy, were hugely important in the development of the monist counterculture. The Human Potential Movement turned the quasi-medical private practice of psychotherapy into quasi-religious public performances that resembled Christian revival meetings—and, increasingly, vice versa. The New Age offered consciousness transformation through endlessly diverse methods such as meditation, past-life regression, channelling, yoga, biofeedback, and self-hypnosis.

Before the Twentieth Century, Christianity was mostly about conduct and belief, not experience. This was very much true of American Fundamentalism, which is where the core leadership of the dualist counterculture came from. The idea of “religious experience” is Romantic, dating from the late 1700s, but it remained marginal in Christianity up to the 1980s. At that point, the fundamentalists reluctantly folded aspects of “charismatic” Pentecostalism into the new countercultural religion.

Charismatic Christianity features intensely emotional worship, emphasizing individual experience, spontaneous singing and dancing, and being “slain in the Spirit” (falling to the floor in religious ecstasy). It empowers supposedly-supernatural practices including “speaking in tongues,” divine healing, prophesy, exorcism and “spiritual warfare,” and (in some churches) miracles such as snake-handling and drinking poison without ill effects.20

Both countercultures fetishized concepts of a definitive, personal religious event. Supposedly this was an initial, overwhelming, dramatic, emotional religious experience, which lasts only a few minutes to a few days, but which sets in motion an unstoppable process of internal transformation. That is gradual and less intense, but spreads and deepens, and eventually results in a complete reconfiguration of the self that brings it into conformity with the Ultimate Truth or Cosmic Plan.

In the monist counterculture, this was often called “Enlightenment,” and supposedly came from some sort of “Eastern religion” like “Zen.”21 In the dualist counterculture, it was the “conversion experience,” “being born again,” or “baptism with the Holy Spirit.”22 In the mid-’80s, nearly half of Americans claimed to have been Born Again—probably even more than had been Enlightened.

Promises of this-worldly benefits

God is something like a combination Divine Butler and Cosmic Therapist: he is always on call, takes care of any problem that arises, professionally helps his people to feel better about themselves.23

Traditional religion mainly devalued the actual, material and social world, in favor of another, transcendent one, that might be reached in the afterlife or through mystical means. The religions of both countercultures paid lip service to transcendence, but marketed their pragmatic value in this world. Both countercultures promised that you could improve your material and social circumstances by reworking your self. De facto, they celebrated hedonism—within bounds—and (especially on the right) enthusiastic consumption of the fruits of the capitalist market economy.24

New Age quackery and Christian faith healing, both operating more on the soul than the body, could cure diseases without limit. Religions on both sides promised economic success through magical means.

Evangelicals increasingly identified with the materialistic and individualistic trajectories of American society. They abandoned the humility and self-doubt of their Puritan forebears for a therapeutic Christianity that primarily asked “what can God do for you?”

Christian practice became less associated with self-denial, awareness of sin, and tough moral codes than with health, business success, and self-esteem. Conversion came to mean psychological healing. Sermons explained how faith empowered people and helped them become more affluent and better integrated. Churches presented themselves as providers of spiritual and community resources for personal and family needs.

Lifestyle churches showcased religion as useful for personal and social ends, rather than as an expression of devotion to God. By emphasizing self-help, rather than sin and damnation, faith became a means of social adjustment in this life, rather than a preparation for life after death. The countercultural construction of the converted self matched the normative requirements of consumerist market society.25

Assessment: shooting the wrong horse

Rationality was never the problem with the systematic mode. The fault actually laid in eternalism. The countercultures attacked the wrong one. Founded on this misunderstanding, it is not surprising that the countercultural religions were mostly stupid and harmful. That said, they were honest efforts to solve serious problems, and their legacies are not all bad.

The countercultural project of resolving the disconnect between self and society mostly failed, at both ends. That is because it left intact the structure of their relationship, tinkering only with reforms in each separately. In fact, by exaggerating both individualism and collectivism, it made the conflict starker than before.

At the self end, religious leaders promised revolutions in consciousness that would bring about profound personal and social transformation. If many monist counterculturalists had succeeded in seeing through subject/object duality, and always acted from non-rational awareness of the connectedness of all things, then the Age of Aquarius might indeed be upon us. If many dualist counterculturalists had succeeded in accepting the infilling of the Holy Spirit, and always acted from non-rational awareness of the will of God, then the Rapture might indeed be imminent.

But this turned out to be mostly wishful thinking. Available consciousness-transformation methods were less powerful than hoped. Mostly, all the religions accomplished was a change in the contents of consciousness—“beliefs”—not in its structure or mode of being. Counterculturalists adopted some new mythology, and many enjoyed transient non-ordinary experiences brought on by drugs, conversion, or ritual. Few selves transformed significantly and durably.

Intelligent advocates of the countercultural religions—both monist and dualist—might say that they should not be judged by their least rigorous presentations, by populist distortions, or by the effects of their superficial appropriations by the clueless and uncommitted. I agree, if the criterion is the usefulness of the religion to a sincere and intelligent seeker. Thinkers from both countercultures offer valuable insights: Carlos Castaneda and Francis Schaeffer, Starhawk and Rick Warren.

However, here I am concerned with cultural history: the countercultures’ effect on the population at large. Some of that was beneficial:

  • In both countercultures, anti-rationalism legitimized temporary escapes from grim systemic regimentation, into ecstatic communal altered states.
  • Religious methods did help many counterculturalists develop greater psychological sophistication (even as many others regressed into pre-rational idiocy).
  • The “morality wars,” although profoundly harmful to American public discourse, made more people aware of meta-ethical questions, and helped some develop a more sophisticated ethical stance.
  • Some non-rational religious methods, pursued with sufficient tenacity, may indeed bring about significant, long-lasting change.

Overall, though, the countercultures’ anti-rationality and subjectivism undermined effective systematic understandings, methods, and institutions. (I assume readers of Meaningness understand why this was harmful, so I need not elaborate.)

Originally, both countercultures’ new religious movements attracted many intelligent, accomplished people, because they seemed to offer plausible solutions to the nihilism of the systematic mainstream. Gradually, smart people figured out that they were nonsense and left. As the countercultures faded, most other adherents shook off the silliest parts. By the mid-’90s, both the New Age and Fundamentalism were widely seen as “religions for losers.” This has somewhat limited the damage done.

Rationality after counterculturalism

In the next mode of meaningness, subcultures, having abandoned the failed quest for ultimacy and universality, did not need to take any particular position on rationality. Most neither reaffirmed rationality nor harmed it further. We’ll see, though, that subculturalism developed a new structural approach to the self/society mismatch. If fully implemented, it might make the value of rationality more obvious, and the emotional reasons for opposing rationality less compelling.

Tent in snow with disco ball
Now is the winter of rationality’s disco tent

Unfortunately, subculturalism failed, and our present atomized mode abandons coherence altogether. Without any means for structuring relationships among ideas, rationality is impossible. This could eventually be disastrous. However, unlike the countercultural mode, the atomized one is not against rationality; just incapable of it.

I hope and believe there is an opportunity for the fluid mode to reclaim a relativized, non-foundational rationality. The fluid mode explains that rationality is correct that meaning can be neither objective nor subjective, but points out a third alternative that preserves meaning and thereby avoids nihilism. Its meta-rational perspective appropriates rationality as a collection of often-useful, but not ultimate, tools for co-creating meanings.

  • 1. This wasn’t actually new. Both countercultures drew heavily on Romanticism, a major cultural movement of the 1800s, as a source of anti-rational ideas, inspirations, practices, and programs. I discuss this at length in “Countercultures: modern mythologies.”
  • 2. Freudianism is arguably non-rational, and existentialism is arguably non-rational plus non-eternalistic, although both could often fit my definition in practice. Both countercultures did borrow heavily from both Freudianism and existentialism—the monist one overtly, the dualist one covertly.
  • 3. Countercultural Conservatives: American Evangelicalism from the Postwar Revival to the New Christian Right, p. 36, lightly paraphrased.
  • 4. Ross Douthat’s Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics is a useful history of American Christian anti-rationalism in the past few decades. He writes from a center-right perspective, and takes the Christianity of the 1950s, rather than the 1970-80s, as his inspirational model.
  • 5. I’ll return to the “beliefs” in “Countercultures: modern mythologies”—not to debunk them, but to investigate meta-myths about the origins of the myths themselves.
  • 6. The term “subjective turn” comes from Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. There’s an excellent brief discussion in The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion is Giving Way to Spirituality pp. 2-5; you can read it via Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature.
  • 7. See Countercultural Conservatives, p. 28: “The personalization of the religious message in evangelicalism constituted a shift from a concern with the proclamation of an objective and universal truth to a concern with the subjective applicability of truth, and thus embodied an alignment to the normative codes of modern pluralism… The emphasis on the individual in popular evangelicalism had its origin in the existentialist focus on subjectivity and the heroic rebel.”
  • 8. Countercultural Conservatives, p. 102. See also Smith and Denton’s Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers: “A significant part of Christianity in the United States is actually only tenuously Christian in any sense that is seriously connected to the actual historical Christian tradition, but has rather substantially morphed into Christianity’s misbegotten stepcousin, Christian Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.”
  • 9. It is remarkable how willing the movement was to find ethical excuses for its leaders when they were caught snorting cocaine with underage male prostitutes. Such Christian forgiveness was also generally extended to the flock—so long as they publicly swore renewed allegiance to “traditional moral values” afterward. Bad Religion, p. 239, “Evangelical teenagers are more likely to have sex at an early age; Evangelical mothers are more likely to bear children outside marriage; Evangelical marriages are more likely to end in divorce. Catholics have more abortions than the national average.” And, p. 228: “The sense of harmony, unity, and communion that so many mystics experience can provoke a somewhat blasé attitude toward sin and wickedness, and a dismissive attitude toward ordinary moral duties.” See also Cultural Conservatives, p. 146: “While the Christian Right’s insistence on biblical absolutes reinforced its image as the defender of the true faith, it … produced less an assertion of traditional Biblicism than its reduction to generic moral exhortations.”
  • 10. See Weeden, Cohen, and Kendrick’s “Religious attendance as reproductive support” for much useful insight here. The central emphasis on specifically sexual sin was new as of the 1970s, not traditional. It’s notable also that the Biblical basis for opposition to abortion—the #1 moral teaching of the dualist counterculture—is somewhere between extremely scant and non-existent. “Pro-life” and “pro-choice” Christians both claim that a handful of Bible passages support their positions; but all of them, on both sides, seem obscure, oblique, desultory, and dubious. We need to look elsewhere for an explanation for anti-abortion sentiment.
  • 11. E.g.: “The great majority of active Baby Boom Presbyterians subscribe to neither the traditional Presbyterian standards contained in the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Shorter Catechism, nor to any of the more contemporary theological formulations espoused by their church.” Bad Religion, p. 77. “Eight in ten Americans say they are Christians, only four in ten know that Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount, and only half could name the four gospels.” Countercultural Conservatives, p. 33, calling this a “cycle of biblical illiteracy.”
  • 12. See Countercultural Conservatives pp. 28-33 and 124-5 for further discussion of the themes of this paragraph.
  • 13. “The era witnessed an extraordinary weakening of organized Christianity in the United States and a fundamental shift in America’s spiritual ecology—away from institutional religion and toward a more do-it-yourself and consumer-oriented spirituality—that endures to the present day.” Bad Religion, p. 62.
  • 14. Bad Religion, pp. 178, 181.
  • 15. This was taken to Perennialist extremes by the monist counterculture, which considered all religions interchangeable. It blithely mixed bits of Aztec myths, Daoism, and Sufism—as representative “wisdom traditions”—in a single sentence.
  • 16. Brink Lindsey, “The Aquarians and the Evangelicals,” Reason, Jun. 27, 2007.
  • 17. Kramer and Alstad’s The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power, p. 167ff, analyzes fundamentalism as a response to the divided self. It’s motivated by fear of internal anarchy; that without external restraint, you couldn’t maintain control over evil parts of yourself, which would run amok. Fundamentalism makes this pattern worse, by reinforcing ideas of internal evil and undercutting self-trust. However, surrender to it actually does (temporarily) end internal conflicts by tipping the internal power balance in favor of one part of the self against all others. This frees up a lot of energy, and in a social context creates powerful bonds with people who have made the same move.
  • 18. Not least because it doesn’t exist. The subcultural mode made a major advance in abandoning the quest for the unified True Self, and beginning to develop realistic methods for living successfully with a fragmented self.
  • 19. Countercultural Conservatives, p. 94. See further discussion there, p. 95 et passim.
  • 20. This has long sounded like big fun to me. I’ve avoided ever going to a Pentecostal service, for fear I’d abandon Buddhism.
  • 21. The “Zen enlightenment experience” was mostly invented by D. T. Suzuki, who got it from William James, who got it from the Eighteenth Century Christian mystic (and proto-Romantic) Emmanuel Swedenborg. See Robert Sharf’s “The Rhetoric of Experience and the Study of Religion” for discussion of this history, and for a useful deconstruction of “religious experience” in general.
  • 22. The phrase “born again” appears just thrice, obscurely each time, in the Bible. It was very rarely used before the publication of Watergate conspirator Chuck Colson’s remarkable 1976 book Born Again, and then-Presidential candidate Jimmy Carter’s public statement that he was “born again” a few months later. For an interesting discussion of the former, and the “conversion” phenomenon more generally, see Charles Griffin’s The Rhetoric of Form in Conversion Narratives. I suspect that the dualist countercultural understanding of the conversion experience leaned heavily on Romantic sources, but I haven’t traced this in detail.
  • 23. Smith and Denton, Soul Searching.
  • 24. As a Tantric Buddhist, I think this was a very wise move.
  • 25. This block quote is a mash-up of bits of text from several places in Countercultural Conservatives, edited for concision and clarity.

The personal is political

Protester drops a bra in the trash at the 1968 Miss America Pageant
Protesting the 1968 Miss America Pageant

The slogan “the personal is political,” originating in 1960s feminism, encapsulates both countercultures’ political agenda. Society had to change to accommodate the self; and political action was the way to reform the social structure.

Between them, the two countercultures shoved aside existing power dynamics and created reorganized coalitions which have dominated American politics ever since. Though both movements expired long ago, the struggle between them left a culture war that refuses to die.

A previous page, “Renegotiating self and society,” summarized the countercultures’ political program. The systematic mode had imposed a hard division between self and society, which caused alienation, angst, and anomie. The countercultures addressed these problems by blurring the public/private boundary: the personal is political.

They sought to replace the artificial, seemingly-arbitrary social and personal requirements of the systematic mode with ones they considered natural. They tried to reorient society away from formal, systematic roles toward natural ones: family, unstructured friendships, and local communities. The monist counterculture thought humanistic, egalitarian norms would be more natural. The dualist counterculture thought godly, hierarchical norms would be more natural.

“Authenticity” meant bringing the private and public selves into alignment. This was the obvious response to the painful gap between them. However, it represents a partial reversion toward the choiceless mode. Systems can be unjust, inhumane, rigid, dysfunctional, or outright inimical to human survival. Unfortunately, we still don’t know how to live without them. The choiceless mode feels right but it can’t feed a world of billions of people. The countercultures mostly recognized this, and did seek only to replace existing systems, not to return to a pre-systematic state.1

Merging ethics, politics, religion, and identity

Both countercultures unified politics and morality: the public and private manifestations of “ought.” Merging them helped collapse the self/society boundary. This led to a massive revision of American political, class, and religious systems—as we’ll see in the next page.

The countercultures perceived anomie: a breakdown in morality due to broad recognition that public norms were discordant with private values. Both called for a reform of social norms to bring them closer to ethical norms, and for norms to be strengthened—that is, better enforced against wrong-doers.

Power struggles between economic interest groups were the heart of politics before the countercultures. Conflict between the working class majority and the bourgeois minority drove the main ideological movements, and threatened social collapse. Counterculturalists recognized that such conflicts have no “right” resolution. Everyone may honestly believe their group should win, but that’s nothing more than self-interest.

Eternalism demands an ultimate answer to political questions: there must be an unambiguously correct, clear, simple solution once you see it. A contest of selfish brute political force won’t deliver that. Ethics—a force beyond self-interest—must provide the right answer for politics.

Of course, the countercultures disagreed sharply on some ethical questions. So how do we know that our ethics are right, and theirs are wrong? Religion. Religion gives transcendent, unchallengeable justification for ethical claims. And so both countercultures merged politics with religion, as well as with ethics.2 Not only did they reform politics along religious lines, they also turned their politics into pseudo-religions.

Spiritualizing politics, and politicizing everyday personal interactions, was not an altogether bad thing. Sometimes ethical considerations should trump power politics. Sometimes political considerations should alter personal behavior. However, combined with eternalism (absolutism) and universalism (intolerance of diversity of views), the merger has poisoned both politics and everyday life.

Countercultural politics split Americans into two warring tribes. Lack of distinctions between ethics, politics, and religion is a main cause of the bitterness of culture war. When politics is inseparable from morality, your political opponents do not just have different economic incentives, they are evil: immoral, sub-human, demonic. That makes negotiation and compromise impossible.

As politics came to define what it meant to be a good person, many came to define their selves by membership in one counterculture, and rejection of the other. Political success would require solidarity, and both sides promoted the “brotherhood of all counterculture participants.” However, identification with the monist or dualist tribe eventually proved to be an inadequate basis for self.

The monist personal was political

Pro-choice rally
Image courtesy Dave Bledsoe

The New Left was the monist counterculture’s political program. The Old Left had mainly promoted the economic interest of the working class. The New Left mainly promoted a middle-class personal morality, and mostly lost interest in working class and economic issues.3

Monist politics addressed the crisis of the self: the problems of alienation, angst, and anomie. It started from an improbable synthesis of Marxism, Freudianism, and existentialism—the most important secular systems of meaning in the mid-twentieth century. These systems utterly contradict each other, and also contradict central tenets of the New Left. However, countercultural intellectuals somehow combined them in an ideology of complete liberation of the individual from social norms. Given this incoherent and absolutist origin, it’s not surprising that many of the New Left’s social proposals were simplistic utopian fantasies.

Loosening social norms

In the beginning, the New Left sought mainly to loosen existing social norms, rather than to replace them. The 1950s had been a period of unusually rigid expectations for conformity, which counterculturalists found intolerable. Many of these norms seemed arbitrary, or obsolete, or simply served the selfish interests of elites. Just throwing them off would be a good start. The monist counterculture was, at first, remarkably anti-authoritarian.

After some experience of the consequences of moral breakdown, the counterculture shifted to advocating social reform based on new norms. These were supposed to be more human and natural, in contrast with the industrial, artificial norms of the systematic mode. Leaders intended to create a supportive and egalitarian society. Not everyone got with the program immediately. So, New Left organizations increasingly demanded “discipline,” and monist culture increasingly insisted on correct “consciousness.” The left gradually left behind its New anti-authoritarianism.

Sexual liberation

Sex is perhaps the most personal and private of activities. Before the countercultural merger of the public and private spheres, sex would never have been considered a “political” issue.4

“Victorian morality” was still the official public ideology of sex and family life in the 1960s. For decades, it had been increasingly ignored in private—the very definition of hypocrisy and anomie. Improved contraceptive technology and safe, effective treatments for all the STDs of the time removed rational justifications for restrictive sexual norms.

Herbert Marcuse was probably the most important New Left theorist. His Eros and Civilization rejects Freud’s pessimistic conclusion in Civilization and Its Discontents (which I discussed previously) that the self, particularly its sexual desires, must be subordinated to the social system. Modern political repression, Marcuse argued, is based on sexual repression. For the New Left, the sexual revolution was inseparable from the struggle against oppressive corporations and an oppressive state.

This program was partly successful. By the mid-1970s, when the monist counterculture petered out, a majority of Americans had adopted a much more liberal sexual morality than was publicly acceptable in the early ’60s.

Family

The counterculture considered the Victorian family oppressive for all participants, and set out to dissolve it.

For children, they said, the family was a training ground for a future role as subordinates in an oppressive society. The family’s purpose was to create “authoritarian personalities.” Victorian family theorists had made this entirely explicit: children must be taught unquestioning obedience to arbitrary parental authority in order that they will make “good citizens” as adults. New Left theorists believed this explained the acquiescence of the German and Russian people to Nazi and Stalinist oppression. Families make fascists. In America, families turned out obedient employees, cogs in the machinery of capitalism, whose childhood resignation to emotional abuse also made them joyless, compulsive consumers.

The demand that all men marry and support a wife and children doomed many to an onerous and unwanted breadwinner role. The Beat movement—prologue to hippies—was largely a revolt against work, which implied a revolt against marriage. Hippie men too wanted to sleep around, get high, and listen to music—not spend all their time in a mind-destroying job in order to pay for children they hadn’t asked for.

Hippie women were, likewise, mostly not looking forward to a lifetime stuck at home washing dishes and changing diapers. On the other hand, many discovered that the new social norm that they should have sex with any hippie man who wanted them was not so great either. Some did have children, and then hippie rejection of breadwinning became a problem.

Meanwhile, many more-mainstream women found they enjoyed their careers, and relished the freedom from dependency on men a paycheck gave them. Second-wave feminism began as their political program to end workplace discrimination. Feminism is now hazily remembered as part of the ’60s counterculture, probably because they were lumped together as enemies by the dualist counterculture. The reality was more complicated: feminism was long resisted by most male leaders of the New Left, and of the monist religious and cultural movements.

Community

The Victorian isolated nuclear family ideal was called “traditional,” but it was only a century old. Anthropologists pointed out that it is culturally unusual. Extended families are more typical. These are usually closely woven into broader clans and villages. Children are normally raised by many adults. Unmarried teenage girls also do much of the work, keeping small children out of adults’ hair, and buffering them from excessively harsh parental discipline.

Marcuse, and other countercultural theorists, advocated dissolving nuclear family bonds and replacing them with extended social networks.

Hippie communes put this theory into action. They address both the problem of work and the problem of family. To avoid work, we all move to a remote farm, where we’re out of reach of The System, and we grow all our own food and make everything else we need.5 There we get back in touch with the cycles of nature, live life on a human scale, and do just enough wholesome, meaningful work to meet our own needs—instead of slaving for capitalist exploiters. We hold property in common, so everyone has everything they need. We raise children communally, so they always have many loving adults to turn to.

In almost every case, this ends disastrously, usually within a year or so. The founders have high-minded cooperative ideals, but no one actually wants to plow the field, wash the dishes, or feed other people’s children—and if work is not enforced, gradually everyone does less. (This is especially true of communes whose promise is freedom from work!)

Worse, in the absence of strong social norms, communes attract parasites: freeloaders and sociopaths. The brotherhood of all counterculturalists implies that anyone with long hair can come live on the farm. Soon a lot of long-haired guys show up who expect to be fed and laid and supplied with drugs, in exchange for doing nothing. Often they are surly or even violent as well. We are very nice cooperative egalitarian monist people, and they invariably have some sob story for why they can’t be expected to pull their weight, so none of us wants to tell them to get out. No one even feels they have any authority to do so. After a few months, the productive members of the commune give up and leave; and then so do the parasites, when the free food, sex, and drugs run out.

Communes that succeed have strong social norms. Living there requires high commitment to specific values, beyond the countercultural ones. They are mainly interested in being left alone to do their specific thing, rather than trying to impose it on society at large. These make them subcultural, not countercultural. Unfortunately, during the countercultural era, successful communes mainly ended up being dominated by charismatic authoritarians (who had the gumption to toss out the parasites) and became exploitative cults. Others, more benign, were run by leaders with strong organizational skills, who imposed formal roles and systems and found a profitable non-agrarian economic basis for their community.

The “brotherhood” fantasy, that the counterculture as a whole could function as a community, was a clear failure. Mostly its egalitarian ideals undermined even attempts to create local communities.

The dualist personal was political

Pro-life rally
Image courtesy Wikipedia

Social conservatives, as well as liberals, found the systematic mode’s private/public split intolerable. It enabled pervasive moral hypocrisy, for instance in the form of “Sunday Christians,” who said the right things in public, but whose private lives were unaffected by religion. Your public and private lives must match to make you an authentic Christian. This is what “born again” meant to many: that you walk the talk.

A godless society makes that walk hard going. There were plenty of sinners in the ’50s, but at least mainstream society expected basic Christian morality. By the mid-’70s, atheists and perverts had taken over America. Hollywood and universities and the government, and even many supposedly Christian churches, all promoted sin. The dualist political program was a grassroots uprising for basic decency, for religious freedom, for taking America back to the traditional values of its founders. (Or so its leaders said.)

They cited the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion, as one of the main reasons for launching their counterculture. The Court’s reasoning in this case was based on the right to privacy: affirming the public/private distinction. The personal, said the Court, was not political.

The founders of the Moral Majority—the foremost dualist-counterculture political organization—were also motivated by their disappointment at “born again” President Jimmy Carter’s rejection of “the personal is political.” Carter refused to publicly oppose abortion despite his private conservative Evangelical religious beliefs.

With the Supreme Court and the President advocating moral hypocrisy, a counter-cultural politics was imperative. The dualist political program worked to collapse the public and private in order to return society to natural, godly norms. This project complemented the dualist religious movement’s technologies of the self, which strengthened souls against the temptations of the new hedonism, nihilism, and atheism.

Large-family values

Dualists agreed with monists that the “traditional family” was not working. They wrote the opposite prescription, though: it should be strengthened and supported, not dissolved.

“Family values” was the central dualist counterculture slogan. For liberals, the list of issues this covers is puzzling. It seems senseless and disparate, and mostly to have nothing to do with families, although weirdly obsessed with sex. If there is any common theme, perhaps it is “don’t enjoy yourself!”—and it is hard to see how that is anything other than mean-spirited.

Social conservatives seem incapable of explaining “family values” other than in Biblical terms. Such justifications are nonsense, because social conservatives ignore most Biblical prohibitions, and they only started caring about the main “family values” in the 1970s.6 Before then, conservative Protestants mostly thought abortion was fine. Sodomy had always been a sin, but an obscure one; fundamentalists had been far more concerned to preach against drinking, dancing, and gambling. The “family values” agenda must have some other, powerful, unstated motivation. Baffled liberals may attribute it to pure malice: hatred rooted in innate evil.

I’ve recently come to a tentative, alternative understanding that makes me much more sympathetic.7 If we take the dualist political agenda as promoting large families, its specific positions suddenly make sense. In fact, conservatives do have significantly more children than liberals, on average.

Three reproductive strategies have been common in America in the past half-century:8

  1. Opportunistic mating without marriage, and with minimal parental investment—especially, minimal support by fathers. This is most common among the underclass and lower working class.
  2. Early marriage (teens or early twenties); many children, starting shortly after marriage; emphasis on life-long monogamy; and high total parental investment, spread over many children. This large-family strategy became typical mainly of the upper working class and lower middle class.
  3. Marriage and children delayed to late twenties or into the thirties in order to accumulate resources (university education and establishing a career); multiple sexual relationships before marriage; fewer children; highest per-child parental investment. This is typical of the upper middle class.

The “family values” agenda makes sense when interpreted as promoting the large-family, early-marriage strategy as against both of the others. As a political movement, it attempts to get the government to support its reproductive strategy, and to hinder, prohibit, or punish the others.

Take abortion, the foremost issue of the religious right.9 Those pursuing the early strategy have little use for abortion, because they intend to have lots of children as soon as they can. On the other hand, unintended early childbirth ruins the delayed strategy by interrupting education or professional career development. Before legal abortion, it forced many women to abandon their life plans altogether. It set many men back in their careers as well, because to support an unwanted child they had to maximize current income, instead of pursuing education or prestigious but low-paid training positions. Conversely, if you are currently unable to support children at all—often true for those who adopt the opportunistic strategy—abortion may be pragmatically necessary. If we assume that sabotaging the opportunistic and delayed strategies are the point of the anti-abortion movement, its moral condemnation of both “welfare queens” and “selfish career women” makes sense.10

The large-family, early strategy requires enormous personal sacrifice. If you have six children, then realistically one parent does have to stay home, taking care of them all day every day. Many people enjoy caring for children, but doing it almost your entire adult life, with little time to enjoy or express yourself, is a long hard grind, and emotionally restricting. Financially, in addition to per-child costs, the family has to give up on the potential second income. There is less parental attention and less money per child than in smaller families; preparing and paying for college may be infeasible, for instance. For the employed parent, the financial stress and responsibility, the risk of catastrophe if you lose your job, and the impossibility of taking time off, are equally grinding.

Social liberals should recognize that sticking to this plan, in the face of constant temptations to irresponsibility, is genuinely noble. Religious conservatives congratulate themselves on being “moral” because they are “godly.” Liberal atheists should recognize that they are moral: not because they follow the Bible, but because they work extremely hard, for the sake of others, in difficult circumstances, when they do have alternative options.

In fact, because the big-family strategy is so grueling, it needs intensive memetic support. For many people, switching to strategy 1 (abandoning your wife and children, having an affair, getting high instead of cleaning the house, spending money on something fun the family can’t afford) looks attractive all too often. It is easier, more enjoyable in the short run, and might seem rational for the longer term, too. Constant reminders of absolute, eternalistic religious justifications help keep you on the straight and narrow. A community—a church—that reinforces the message with social confirmation and peer pressure, checking every week to see that you have not gone astray, is invaluable. And, the Christian technologies of the self were designed to make the large-family strategy more emotionally bearable.

The delayed, small-family strategy is the most personally rewarding, for those capable of it. However, it only makes sense if you have something better to do with your twenties. That means college, and the kinds of jobs that require eighty-hour-a-week work at low pay during your twenties in exchange for prestige or a very high salary later: entry-level positions as an academic, doctor, lawyer, or investment banker.11 Mostly, these are inaccessible for young people from working-class and lower-middle-class backgrounds. If you are going to work forty hours a week on low-skill jobs for the rest of your life, you might as well have children when you are twenty.

On the other hand, if you are not capable of earning enough money to support a wife and children, strategy 2 is out of reach, and you are stuck with reproductive opportunism.

So it is not surprising that the religious right was—and still is—rooted in the upper working class and lower middle class.12 And this explains its sudden emergence in the 1970s. Economic changes during the 1960s made strategies 1 and 3 both work better than they had. Increased workplace opportunity for women, general prosperity, and more generous welfare support made strategy-1 single motherhood much more feasible and attractive than it had been. Increasing subsidies for college tuition, plus a widening gap between blue-collar and professional/managerial salaries, made the delayed-marriage strategy 3 both easier to access and more attractive.

This meant that people pursuing the large-family strategy saw greater competition from the others than previously. It also meant many were tempted to switch. That could be threatening in several ways. At a practical level, as an example, for a man, it was more likely that your wife would leave and support herself. (This is why wives’ obedience and dependency were so heavily promoted, and why conservatives oppose workplace equality.)

Psychologically, the shifts caused great cognitive dissonance. Strategy 2 had been the best option for most people for decades—but maybe now it wasn’t? Surely I made the right decision—but now the others look better? What can it mean, when fundamental life choices change out from under you? This provokes confusion, resentment, and uncertainty. Anti-rational religious claims were a relatively effective treatment. You could take pride in doing what was religiously right, at great cost, even though it might seem senseless otherwise.

In fact, over the past few decades, many have shifted away from the early-marriage, large-family strategy. Some have moved in the direction of delay. Conservatives have smaller families than they did—although on average they still have almost one more child than liberals. Many send children to college—despite the discrimination conservatives may face there. On the other hand, economic trends that started in the 1970s have accelerated, making it ever more difficult to raise a family on a single working-class income. Many have despaired, given up, and slid into strategy 1—which may seem like total failure.

If this strategy analysis of social conservatism is right, its eternalistic religious rhetoric is a smoke screen. The “family values” agenda is just self-interested: it tries to harm competing social classes and benefit its own. The large-family strategy it promotes is not “more moral”; it is good for some people and bad for others. Forcing it on the underclass—“you can’t have children unless you have a steady job and stay married”—means they will fail, and be eliminated as competition. Forcing it on the upper middle class—“you can’t have sex unless it results in children, and mothers have to stay home to care for them”—eliminates much of their advantage.

Still, this understanding of what they are up to makes me more, not less, sympathetic to social conservatives. They are not just being irrationally hateful. Pursuing self-interest, and moralizing it to conceal selfish motivations even from oneself, is universal. It can’t be condemned.

Also, from this perspective, one can see sexual liberalism as mainly self-interested politicking for strategy 3. Getting to sleep around, while waiting to have children until you’ve gotten your professional degree and established your career, makes your twenties tolerable.

The core of the monist counterculture was college-educated, middle class people in their twenties. Some went back to the “straight world” in their thirties, pursuing the delayed strategy. Some “dropped out” permanently and defaulted to the opportunistic strategy. You can view their contempt for “traditional marriage” as merely a self-interested attempt to harm those pursuing strategy 2.

Indeed, while sexual freedom is functional for some people, the change in social attitudes since the ’60s has been devastating for others. I find plausible arguments made by Charles Murray, in Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, and Theodore Dalrymple, in Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass. The loosening of social norms, particularly around sex, drugs, and family, which originated in the monist counterculture and which is propagated by the leftish upper middle class, has been catastrophic for the working class. Millions who might have led decent early-marriage strategy-2 lives have slipped instead into the underclass: destructive drug addiction, permanent unemployment, crime, child neglect and abuse.13

Dualist community

The monist counterculture’s Romantic fantasy of community was the rural commune. One reason those failed was that most hippies were from middle-class urban backgrounds, and had no clue how to start a balky tractor, snake a drain, or slaughter a hog. The core of the dualist counterculture came from the rural working class, for whom such things are everyday tasks. If only they had been able to cooperate!

In fact, “Jesus freaks”—Charismatic Christian hippies—formed some of the most successful communes. Their Jesus Movement, which predated the main dualist counterculture, was an important bridge between the two, working out ways hippie innovations could be adapted for use by Christian conservatives.14

The dualist counterculture appealed particularly to people from rural backgrounds who experienced culture shock when they moved to cities and office-park suburbs for work. The main dualist fantasy of community was an idealization of “traditional” small-town life—“traditional” meaning “all the good stuff with none of the bad.” Despite much talk, the counterculture had no credible program for fixing rampant rural social pathology, so this was no more realistic than the hippie commune movement.

Churches were centers of the dualist counterculture. Church community can provide substantial material support, in addition to the memetic and social support I mentioned earlier. However, existing church institutions were inadequate. The counterculture innovated extensively in sermons and service style, music, management structure, marketing, architecture, and social ministries.

The most successful new-model churches grew explosively into megachurches, a qualitatively new form of social organization. Like the few successful communes, these became subsocieties: local communities with a distinctive subculture that served a wide array of social needs. This was far more functional in practice than “traditional small-town life.” Hoping to reform small towns nationally was a characteristically countercultural project; megachurches are a subcultural one. Therefore, I will discuss them in detail in the next chapter, rather than here.

Upshot and aftermath

In the end, neither counterculture had a workable program for reforming the self, or society, or for renegotiating their relationship.

Although the proposals of both countercultures were extreme, neither was sufficiently radical. Both left intact a structure of individuals and a nation-scale society confronting each other across an unbridgeable gap. Both merely fiddled with details on either side of the chasm, rather than proposing a fundamentally different approach to the problems of individualism and collectivism. This is a major reason the countercultures failed.

Their social proposals were simplistic and utopian. Social liberalism is not right. It is good only for some people. Social conservatism is also not right; just good for some people. The fact is, different sorts of people need different social arrangements, including different sexual, family, and community norms.

Later I will argue that this was the fundamental error of the countercultures: universalism. Both tried to impose their preferred way of life on everyone else. However, neither way was accepted by a majority, let alone everyone.

This failure brought out totalitarian tendencies in both countercultures—particularly the dualist one. Totalitarianism, too, makes the personal political and seeks to destroy the boundary between a social system and individuals. It would take extreme state repression to force everyone into a uniform code of sexual morality. Imposing an early-marriage large-family strategy is, indeed, a central project of Islamism, a totalitarian dualist counterculture.15 Fortunately, in America, both countercultures grudgingly accepted their democratic failure, with only minor terrorist violence from extremists on each side.

Although neither counterculture’s political program was adopted in full, both partially succeeded in transforming American government, law, and social norms. (More about that in “Rotating politics ninety degrees clockwise.”) Both caused considerable harm to society and to individuals, but also had some benefits.

Making explicit that the self/society boundary needed softening and reworking was a helpful step toward the subcultural mode. The conflict between the countercultures made clearer what the problems of self and society are. It made some people aware that social systems are contingent constructions, not absolute truths, so we all have a responsibility to help them evolve. Although both countercultures were eternalist, most people found themselves somewhere in the middle, which made eternalism, monism, and dualism less credible. That too set us up for the subcultural mode’s move away from all three of those confused stances.

Subculturalism developed structurally new models of the self, of society, and their relationship:

  • Acknowledging the fragmentation of the self as inevitable made it increasingly unproblematic.
  • Acknowledging diversity (including diversity of moral views) allows like-minded people to form distinctive subsocieties. This provided a layer of organization intermediate between the family and the nation-state.
  • Thus, the extreme ideals of existentialist individualism (the one-pointed self perfectly separated from social influence) and totalitarian collectivism (the boundaryless self entirely dissolved in social conformity) both lost their appeal.
  • 1. There were exceptions, particularly in the monist counterculture. Monist movements like anti-capitalism, anti-rationalism, eco-primitivism, the Noble Savage mythos, and the back-to-the-land movement would have destroyed systematicity altogether if actually carried out. The dualist counterculture’s alliance with the big-business Republican right mainly forestalled similar moves, although its fringier anti-rational elements could have been equally catastrophic if they had gained power.
  • 2. One manifestation: Christian Voice, the second-most-important Christian Right organization, issued influential “Morality Ratings” on every member of Congress, based on their support or opposition to its legislative agenda.
  • 3. Although the New Left was officially Marxist and anti-capitalist, it had no substantive economic program. Its supposed anti-capitalism was mainly actually opposition to the emotionally unfulfilling “iron cage” of employment in big-business bureaucracy; to the responsibility of private industry for environmental destruction; to the military-industrial complex’s promotion of unnecessary wars for profit; and to the inadequacy of government anti-poverty programs. The counterculture was not seriously opposed to a market economy, and was mainly enthusiastic about consuming its bounty of nifty new goods.
  • 4. From the Victorian era forward, do-gooders had campaigned against masturbation and prostitution. Though these campaigns were public, their objects were private, and therefore considered matters of “morality,” not “politics.”
  • 5. Communal agrarian self-sufficiency is a persistent, malign Romantic fantasy. Brook Farm was a hippie commune of the 1840s which failed in just the same way as the ones of the 1960s. The Utopia Experiment describes another attempt ten years ago, which followed the same script again. (This one led by an academic expert on, among other things, the existential risk posed by runaway artificial intelligence.) The underlying fantasy is that the choiceless mode would be paradise. The reality is that it is awful in material terms, even when its human relationships feel more natural.
  • 6. I put “conservative” and “traditional” in quotes for this reason.
  • 7. This model was inspired by sociological research by Jason Weeden and his collaborators. See, for instance, “Religious attendance as reproductive support,” “Sociosexuality vs. fast/slow life history,” and “Churchgoers are restricted individuals in fast groups.” My discussion here is not an accurate summary of Weeden’s views, and he might disagree with it. However, if it includes any useful insights, they are mostly his.
  • 8. These are not the only possible strategies. For example, extended families sharing a single home were mainly extinct in America by the middle of the twentieth century. Polygamy had been banned a century earlier. Both are common elsewhere, and more traditional than the “traditional marriage” promoted by “conservatives.” DINK—dual income, no kids—is an increasingly popular non-reproductive strategy.
  • 9. I could give similar analyses for the other “family values” issues—drugs, pornography, prostitution, feminism, homosexuality, divorce, and so forth. However, I’m not trying to give a detailed account of social conservatism here, just a sketch of a possible explanation of its principle and function.
  • 10. As with any major movement, different people oppose abortion for different reasons. Some have genuine sympathy for fetuses, or genuinely believe that the Bible forbids abortion. However, these moral and religious concerns can’t explain why most Protestants thought abortion was fine until the mid-’70s, before suddenly making it their central political issue. Many abortion opponents do explicitly connect it with “welfare queens,” “sluts,” and “selfish career women,” consistent with a class-based reproductive-strategy analysis. It’s worth noting also that opposition to abortion partly replaced opposition to contraception, which was only made fully legal in America in 1972, by the Supreme Court decision Eisenstadt v. Baird.
  • 11. Plausibly one reason such professions underpay their entry-level positions is to screen out anyone who would prefer strategy 2 to 3—the lower-middle-class riffraff we don’t want in our office.
  • 12. Of course, it has never been entirely restricted to those classes. In fact, one impetus to the 1980s dualist counterculture was the upward mobility of fundamentalists, from the rural working class to the suburban technical middle-middle class, particularly in the Sunbelt defense industry.
  • 13. Of course, economic changes that have disadvantaged the working class are also major factors.
  • 14. See Countercultural Conservatives: American Evangelicalism from the Postwar Revival to the New Christian Right, pp. 101, 131-4, et passim.
  • 15. Islamism was founded by Sayyid Qutb, after spending two years in America, 1949-51. His horror at American sexual openness seems to have been a major inspiration for the movement. “The American girl is well acquainted with her body’s seductive capacity. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs and she shows all this and does not hide it.”

Rotating politics ninety degrees clockwise

Galleon tilting on giant wave
Galleon courtesy George Grie

I write this during the 2016 American presidential election campaign, which portends a massive political realignment. The two countercultures of the 1960s-80s created stable party coalitions that persisted for decades. This year, they are breaking up.

Understanding where these coalitions came from may help understand how they have functioned, why American politics is so polarized, and what may happen next.

The countercultures redefined the American “left” and “right” from economic to “values” ideologies. Politics shifted from arguments about pragmatic policy questions to fights over meaningness itself. The Democratic and Republican Parties repositioned themselves as champions of monist and dualist countercultural values, respectively. This polarizes American politics irresolvably.

The countercultures’ political realignment created a new, two-track social class system. It’s personally useful to understand social class better, because it motivates so much of what we all do; but it is also always funny, because we work so hard to hide that from ourselves.

Left and right vary in meaning

In any particular time and place, political affiliation tends to range along a single continuum, which gets labeled left to right. However, “left” and “right” mean quite different things in different places and eras. Ideologues often claim that “what left and right really mean is”—whatever serves their argument. However, political scientists agree that there is no defining issue or axis that consistently distinguishes the two. In American politics, left and right have been redefined several times.

During the countercultural era, the New Left and New Right replaced the Old Left and Old Right. My previous page analyzed the goals of these New movements in cultural terms. Here I look at their implementation in electoral politics.

American first-past-the-post voting rules force a two-party system.1 For many issues, there are more than two possible choices; and groups who agree on one topic may disagree on another. These facts imply that the two parties must always assemble incoherent coalitions of interest groups, somehow held together to cover roughly half the voters. When the sizes of groups change, or a group changes its party affiliation, the system becomes unstable, and new coalitions must be organized.

My account of the countercultural realignment is not a general theory; it is about a specific period in American history. There were partly similar political realignments in some other places around the same time. However, the details of the American rotation were unique, and some key events were just accidental.2 The realignment was driven partly by judicial and legislative actions that granted black Americans voting rights in practice, not just theory. It was also driven partly by economic changes, specifically the growth of the middle class.

So, a “rotation” might have occurred even without the countercultures. However, the parties seized those as powerful, coherent cultural ideologies that could hold together new electoral coalitions.

The Great Rotation

Two diagrams summarize the change. The first illustrates the meanings of “left” and “right” as of 1960:

The American political landscape as of 1960

The main political division was between economic classes.3 The Old Left, and the Democratic Party, represented the working class. The Old Right, and the Republican Party, represented the middle and upper classes. The working class was the majority, and the Democrats had dominated elections for several decades.

Religions aligned with economic class, and with politics.4 The Mainline Protestant denominations were middle class and Republican. Catholics, Fundamentalists, Charismatics, and other “sects” were working class and Democrats. Religious people identified primarily with their denomination, and were hostile to denominations that had significantly different theologies.

During the countercultural era, the main political division “rotated clockwise,” as indicated by the dashed arrows in the diagram above.5 By 1980, “left” and “right” had new meanings:

The American political landscape as of 1980

The new politics of meaning was primarily a division within the middle class, who were now an electoral majority.6 The New Left mainly promoted social freedoms and the social rights of non-economic demographic groups (race, sex, sexual orientation, etc.). It explicitly disclaimed interest in the working-class economic concerns of the Old Left.7 The New Right mainly promoted a “large-family values” agenda, despite its alliance with business groups.

Religion realigned along with politics:

  • The New Right, invented by Fundamentalists, united highly-observant religious people of all religions, denominations, and sects. The three leaders of the Moral Majority were a Protestant, a Catholic, and a Jew. That was a deliberate statement that all religious conservatives share key moral values, so arcane theological disputes should be put aside.8
  • The New Left united everyone else: atheists, agnostics, “spiritual but not religiousmonists, and Christians who didn’t go to church, or didn’t let God get in the way of a normal life. That last category included a majority of Mainline Protestants.

The new two-track class system

The broad prosperity of the 1960s defused the economic class conflicts that had dominated politics from the beginning of the century. For the middle class, social status became more important than income, because everyone in the class had everything they really needed. Americans’ class was increasingly determined by their cultural values, rather than by income.

Social status came to be largely a matter of mouthing counterculturally-correct opinions. I wrote about this at length in “Ethics is advertising”:

The countercultures split the American middle class into two hostile tribes. Members of both considered anyone in the other tribe inherently immoral. With us, or against us! To be minimally acceptable as a human being, you had to demonstrate commitment to the correct side.

The middle class developed parallel social status ladders. You climb one of the ladders by demonstrating skill in conforming to, and expressing, either monist or dualist values.

To count as a member in good standing of the monist (“left”) tribe, you needed to have the correct opinion about hundreds of issues. You had to like tofu, Bob Dylan, Cesar Chavez, and Tom Robbins, and to hate nuclear power, Dolly Parton, Ronald Reagan, and the Moral Majority.

To be upper middle class, you need to be able to figure out, on the fly, what would be the correct opinion about things that are new to you. This requires conceptual sophistication: years of study not only of details, but also of ways to think. That is what a liberal arts education used to be for.

The great thing about the new system is that everyone in the monist middle class could consider themselves superior to everyone in the dualist one, and vice versa. Morally, at least, and that’s what counts in the new class system. Suddenly, everyone was above average!

Unfortunately, to maintain above-average status, everyone on each ladder has to constantly reinforce their belief in the worthlessness and moral degeneracy of everyone on the other one. This is one reason the culture war is so bitter and intractable. We fear that if it ended, we’d have to go back to measuring our self-worth in dollars, rather than political correctness.

Also unfortunately, making “values” a major determinant of social worth created an endless negative-sum signaling competition for position on each ladder. This game is negative-sum because the main signaling techniques involve conspicuous wastes of time and cognitive effort. Also, of course, the whole culture-war “values” game is negative-sum because it’s actively harmful to social cohesion and sensible government.

One of the best innovations of the subcultural mode was to create a panoply of small status hierarchies, so we could ignore the social status and signaling efforts of everyone outside our subculture. This is much healthier for individuals, but unfortunately it allowed Generation X to drop out of political involvement. That meant the Baby Boomers’ destructive culture war persisted long after the death of their countercultures.

Meanwhile, the culture war was cheerfully coopted by consumer capitalism. Income does still contribute to your position on the middle class ladder, even if it does not determine it. Every conceivable category of consumer product comes in monist and dualist versions, at a full range of price points. You can precisely signal which ladder you are on, and how high up, by what you fill your house with.

I do most of my shopping in Reno, Nevada. Reno has two upscale malls, a monist mall and a dualist mall.9 The monist mall is anchored by an Apple Store; the dualist mall is anchored by Scheels, which sells thousands of guns from a showroom floor the size of half a football field.

Mac Pro

At the Apple Store, for $9,827.00 you can get a fully-spec’d Mac Pro with a 12-core Xeon E5 processor, 64GB of DDR3 ECC RAM, and dual D700 FirePro GPUs with 12GB of GDDR5 VRAM. That’s 7 teraflops of crunch, and you’ve got 528 GB/s of memory bandwidth. You can drive eight streams of 4K video in real time. It’s plenty powerful enough to do 3D animation and post-production for major studio films.

The Dalai Lama advertising Apple computers

That’s insane, nobody needs a computer like that at home. Anyway, Apple doesn’t even make real computers. Just pansy-ass crap for kids and art fags, promoted by the Dalai fucking Lama.

Hey, maybe I’ll make an indie video game hit and make a squillion dollars. Don’t think I couldn’t do it! I’d need a computer like that.

Barrett 82A1 rifle
Barrett 82A1 image courtesy Heavennearth

At Scheels, for $12,371.99 you can get a fully-spec’d Barrett 82A1 rifle with an ATACR 5-25x56F1 scope. The semiautomatic 82A1 fires .50 BMG heavy machine gun rounds. It’s accurate at 1800 meters, and .50 BMG will go through brick and concrete walls, or destroy a truck’s engine block. The US military uses it in anti-materiel applications: you can take out an aircraft, in a closed hangar, with a single shot.

Various rifle cartridges including .50 BMG
The .50 BMG, at the left, with conventional rifle cartridges for comparison.
The second-largest, the .300 Win Mag, is a standard for big-game hunting and for military and law-enforcement sniper rifles.

That’s insane, there’s no conceivable civilian use for a thing like that. Assault rifles are bad enough, but gun nuts can at least pretend they are going to use them for hunting or “self-defense.” Why do we let these fucking fascist-wannabe rednecks buy military heavy weapons?

Hey, maybe there’s going to be a major terrorist attack, or a civil uprising. Don’t think it couldn’t happen here! I’d need a gun like that.

Gun display
Scheels showroom floor

Counterculturalism, rebellion, and authority

The mainstream power structure resisted replacement, so both countercultures adopted the stance of romantic rebellion. “It’s the system, man!” was the hippie explanation for everything wrong with the world. Or, as the New Left called it, “The Establishment.”

Romantic rebellion is not supposed to succeed—success isn’t romantic, it’s practical. But the mainstream was so rotten that it caved, both times, within a few years, making counterculturalists the new Establishment. That left them with no mainstream to rebel against. They had to resort to rebelling against each other, or to denouncing “The Establishment,” which was now themselves. This was ridiculous, and has made a dysfunctional mess of politics ever since.

The monist counterculture was initially highly anti-authoritarian and anti-Establishment, but as it gained power in the Democratic Party, it had to become less so. Its descendent, the current American left, abandoned anti-authoritarianism long ago, and is comfortable using government power to redress perceived social injustices.

The right was traditionally the party of the established order, even though the Republicans had mostly been out of power since the Great Depression. The right’s opposition to the monist counterculture was initially conceived antidisestablishmentarianistically, as preserving traditional institutions against long-haired drug-fueled barbarians. However, by the mid-1970s, a series of liberal Supreme Court decisions—Roe v. Wade (abortion), Bob Jones University (racial segregation in religious schools), and Engel v. Vitale (prayer in public schools)—plus the expected ratification of the ERA (women’s rights)—made it obvious that the system had been seized by perverts.

The New Right organized as a response to these outrages. Allegiance to the Establishment was no longer tenable. Thenceforth, the Republican Party too positioned itself as a radical insurgency against a corrupt establishment. And as the left became increasingly authoritarian, the right could claim increasingly plausibly to be the party of individual liberties.

Decades later, powerful politicians from both parties campaign “against the government” and denounce “Washington insiders.” Such absurdity has had dire consequences for the quality of governance.

The Forever War, and its end

Shifting political conflict from economic to “values” issues lowered the stakes, but pumped up the rhetorical viciousness. Politics can often find reasonable compromises, or even win-win solutions, to economic contests. The Great Rotation created an endless holy war of dueling eternalisms:

  • The countercultures’ “values” are, supposedly, sacred religious principles, on which compromise is unthinkable.
  • The justifications for the values of each side are metaphysical, and make no sense outside the monist or dualist worldview, so arguing with the other party never goes anywhere.
  • In reality, the “values” are mainly tribal shibboleths and claims to personal identity and self-worth—which also resist compromise.

There is a mainstream theory of American political change that says political party realignments occur roughly every 36 years. This is explained by generational replacement. Some political scientists date the last realignment to 1968 (about when the Rotation started); some to 1980 (when it was complete). If you believe in the magic number 36, and start from 1968, we are long overdue. This could be explained in terms of Generation X mostly sitting politics out. Alternatively, if you start from 1980, we’re right on schedule for a major realignment this year (2016).

In any case, I see a current shift to politics in the atomized mode. In “The new politics of meaning,” I called this “the politics of incoherence.” The atomized mode is native for Millennials, and electoral power is passing now from the Baby Boom generation to the Millennials. (Generation X is too small ever to dominate the electorate.) Later, I will discuss atomized politics, as a cultural phenomenon, in detail. How it will function in a two-party system, I cannot currently guess. It includes what I call an “echo counterculture war”; but atomization’s incoherence suggests this cannot persist after the passing of the Boomers.

I hope Generation X, who will be taking institutional leadership from the Baby Boomers over the next decade, will drop the culture war, and can provide adequate structure to keep atomization’s worst consequences at bay.

  • 1. This is called Duverger’s law.
  • 2. According to Frank Schaeffer, who was personally responsible for making abortion a major political issue, and who was extensively involved in the creation of the Religious Right, the Evangelical-Republican alliance was an unplanned and mistaken marriage of convenience that only occurred because a couple relatively minor players happened to hook up. Also, the Southern Strategy was brilliant and necessary in retrospect, but it developed more by empirical observation than rational planning, and was opposed by much of the Republican Party.
  • 3. Left vs. right did not line up perfectly with economics, of course, and there were major political disagreements other than economic ones. Both parties were somewhat incoherent coalitions of convenience before the rotation, just as after. Also, the political alignments of individuals and of groups were generally less coherent, and less polarized, then than now.
  • 4. In fact, both before and after the rotation, religion was the best demographic predictor of American political affiliation, according to polling data.
  • 5. The details of how this happened, in terms of shifts in voter demographics and electoral calculations by the Party leadership, are fascinating in a geeky way. I am resisting writing about that here, because it is well-documented mainstream political history. If you are interested, you could start with the Wikipedia articles on the Fifth Party System, which was the pre-rotation alignment; the Southern Strategy, which returned the Republican Party to power by gaining the votes of the white rural working class, formerly the core of the Democratic Party; and the Sixth Party System, which is the post-rotation alignment. I’ve also written in some detail about the formation of the alliance between Evangelicals (previously majority Democrats) and the Republican Party in the mid-’70s. Theorists disagree about exactly when the Fifth System ended and the Sixth began. I think it was gradual, from about 1964, when the Republicans first gained support among white Southerners opposed to black civil rights, to the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan.
  • 6. A middle class majority meant economic class couldn’t be the basis for a two-party system, which needs a roughly 50/50 split. Put a different way, the Democratic Party had to make a new ideological appeal to the middle class, because its working-class base could no longer keep it in power. The party chose to back monist values, including women’s and racial minority rights, which had previously been Republican issues. That then allowed the Republican party to draw away working-class and lower-middle-class dualists from the Democrats.
  • 7. This was the main point of C. Wright Mill’s Letter to the New Left, one of the movement’s key founding documents.
  • 8. Conservative Christianity, post-rotation, became largely non-denominational. Given that its leaders had, since the 1920s, wasted most of their energy on vicious sectarian battles over incomprehensible metaphysical minutiae, this was a startling and welcome development.
  • 9. Actually, the dualist mall is in Sparks, which is the real Nevada. It’s just across the Truckee River from Reno. Reno is infested with tax exiles from California, so it’s got weird stuff like sushi.

Countercultures: modern mythologies

Steampunk airships battle in the sky
The Airship Battle, courtesy Tom McGrath

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

The two countercultures invented fantastical time-distortion mythologies to confuse future and past. Both created nostalgia for imaginary golden ages, which were actually hoped-for (but implausible) futures. Both promised upcoming utopias that were actually tired fantasies from long ago.

Both countercultures assembled their conceptual frameworks from pieces of several old systems of meaning—most of which were long-discredited, for good reasons, and which clearly contradicted each other. They needed to hide that behind appealing origin myths.

Both countercultures assembled their core membership from several disparate subcultures. To weave them together, they needed big-picture unifying themes, leading to a glorious vision of a shared future. The two themes they selected were monism and dualism; and so they spun stories of harmonious monist and dualist societies to come.

The monist counterculture appealed to neophilia and promised innovation; the dualist counterculture appealed to neophobia and promised a return to tradition. Neither delivered. In fact, we’ll see, on the whole the monist counterculture took more from the past, and the dualist one was more inventive.

Both, however, drew primarily on the Romantic movement of the 1800s, which was the first to grapple seriously with the defects of modern systematicity, and to propose a renegotiation of the relationship between self and society.

Both countercultures promoted absurd “object level” myths—part of the content of their cultures. These included, for example, the founding of the New Age by Mayan and Tibetan priests and the defeat of the Great Beast at Armageddon. These fables—of the monist and dualist countercultures, respectively—were not seriously meant to be believed.

The countercultures also promoted “meta-level myths,” which you were meant to believe. These were myths about the sources and nature of the countercultures themselves. You were meant to believe that the monist counterculture had a radical new vision for society, culture, and self. You were meant to believe that the dualist counterculture was a seamless continuation of traditional Christianity, as it existed before the perversions of the 1960s. Both these meta-myths were mainly false.

According to Lyotard’s original explanation of postmodernity, meta-myths are the essence of “modernity,” or what I call “the systematic mode. (He called them “grand narratives.”) As modernity’s failure loomed, the authors of meta-myths became increasingly frantic, and their creations increasingly fantastical. The countercultures deluded themselves about their own nature, and that is part of why they failed.

The countercultures were the last phase of modernity, and the subcultures the first phase of postmodernity. The subcultures abandoned all grand narratives, and instead created playful mythologies that you were not supposed to believe. Sky battles between steampunk airships are not credible—but they are fun! I will suggest that such transparent mythologizing is a key resource for the fluid mode.

Fundamentalism is countercultural modernism

Fundamentalism claims to be traditionalist, and opposed to modernity. It is actually modernist, and opposed to tradition—and to postmodernity.

Burqa with full niqab is not traditional in most Muslim cultures
Traditional dress for Muslim women varies widely by culture, and details are not prescribed by scripture

Fundamentalism remade hundreds of millions of people’s mode of relating to meaning when it exploded out of obscurity four decades ago. Any account of the future of meaningness must, at minimum, understand fundamentalism as background. The Christian version is still hugely influential in America, although waning. Islamic fundamentalism is the worst memetic threat the world faces currently—although I will suggest it too is on its way out.

Misunderstanding fundamentalisms as “traditional” and “anti-modern” makes it impossible to respond coherently. Recognizing them as modern, anti-traditional, and anti-postmodern is the necessary starting point for understanding.

This page explains how fundamentalist movements:

  • are modern in the sense of “recently invented”
  • are modernist in the sense of providing a systematic structure of justification
  • arise because traditions can’t defend against “why?”; only modernist systems can
  • are anti-traditional in rejecting cultural specificity in favor of abstract universalism
  • are anti-traditional in rejecting complex customary beliefs, practices, and institutions in favor of someone’s new and radical explanation of a supposed clear and simple Ultimate Truth
  • are countercultural: “new, alternative, universalist, eternalist, anti-rational systems”
  • originally opposed rational modernity but now mainly oppose postmodernity, i.e. the end of the possibility of systematic eternalism
  • require extremism because modernity is over and eternalism can no longer work
  • are failing, and being replaced with atomized postmodern alternatives.

I sympathize with fundamentalists: postmodernity has frightening defects and dangers. I end the page by recommending that religious people find other, more effective strategies than fundamentalism for opposing postmodern threats to meaning.

Fundamentalism is modern

Fundamentalism is just over a century old. The word “fundamentalism” itself was coined only in the 1920s. It was also only in the 1920s that fundamentalism became a significant force—and then only for a few years, before going underground for decades.

World War I (1914-18) was a profound shock for eternalist certainty in meanings. Social, cultural, and psychological systems began to disintegrate. Fundamentalism seemed to promise their restoration; and this accounts for its 1920s popularity.

However, the movement began just before WWI,1 as a reaction against “modernist” theology. This explains why it still claims to be anti-modern, although that was (we will see) not exactly true in the 1920s, and became altogether untrue in fundamentalism’s second phase, beginning in the 1970s.

Modernist theology developed in the late Victorian era as a response to the twin challenges posed to Christianity by Darwinism and historical criticism of the Bible. The modernists’ goal was to adapt Christianity to the new scientific and historical consensus, and to maintain the relevance of faith in an intellectual climate suddenly grown dismissive of the authority of Scripture. To this end, they stressed ethics rather than eschatology; social reform rather than confessional debate; symbolic and allegorical interpretations of the Bible rather than more literal readings.2

The 1920s fundamentalists rightly recognized that Christian modernism was a slippery slope to humanism, secularism, atheism, and nihilism. Half a century later, starting in the late 1960s, the modernist Mainline Protestant denominations imploded. They had eliminated nearly everything from religion except ethics, and then adopted mainstream secular ethics, and so had nothing distinctive to offer anyone.

Fundamentalism suffered a grievous blow in 1925 when its prosecution of the Scopes “monkey trial” (over the teaching of evolution) made it look ridiculous to most Americans. It retreated into a marginal subculture for many decades.

A second wave of fundamentalism emerged in the 1970s, as the innovative memetic core of one of the two great countercultures. This was another period of visible shakiness in the systematic mode of meaningness. The “hippie” monist counterculture challenged mainstream systems, with surprising success. It was also a time of rapid cultural globalization; the mass media suddenly exposed Americans to unfamiliar images and ideas from afar. Within the West, the postmodern era was just beginning—“postmodern” here meaning the condition in which all systems have been discredited. Fundamentalism again offered a bulwark of certainty against the disintegration of meaning.

Islamic fundamentalism has a similar history. Although it has roots in 1700s Wahhabism, the movement began only in the early 20th century, and remained mainly marginal until the 1970s, when it formed the innovative memetic core of the Islamist counterculture. The same pattern holds true for Jewish, Hindu, and Buddhist fundamentalisms.

Fundamentalism is modernist

Fundamentalism describes itself as traditional and anti-modern. This is inaccurate. Early fundamentalism was anti-modernist, in the special sense of “modernist theology,” but it was itself modernist in a broad sense. Systems of justifications are the defining feature of “modernity,” as I (and many historians) use the term.

The defining feature of actual tradition—“the choiceless mode”—is the absence of a system of justifications: chains of “therefore” and “because” that explain why you have to do what you have to do. In a traditional culture, you just do it, and there is no abstract “because.” How-things-are-done is immanent in concrete customs, not theorized in transcendent explanations.

Genuine traditions have no defense against modernity. Modernity asks “Why should anyone believe this? Why should anyone do that?” and tradition has no answer. (Beyond, perhaps, “we always have.”) Modernity says “If you believe and act differently, you can have 200 channels of cable TV, and you can eat fajitas and pad thai and sushi instead of boiled taro every day”; and every genuinely traditional person says “hell yeah!” Because why not? Choice is great! (And sushi is better than boiled taro.)

Fundamentalisms try to defend traditions by building a system of justification that supplies the missing “becauses.” You can’t eat sushi because God hates shrimp. How do we know? Because it says so here in Leviticus 11:10-11.3

Secular modernism tries to answer every “why” question with a chain of “becauses” that eventually ends in “rationality,” which magically reveals Ultimate Truth. Fundamentalist modernism tries to answer every “why” with a chain that eventually ends in “God said so right here in this magic book which contains the Ultimate Truth.”

The attempt to defend tradition can be noble; tradition is often profoundly good in ways modernity can never be. Unfortunately, fundamentalism, by taking up modernity’s weapons, transforms a traditional culture into a modern one. “Modern,” that is, in having a system of justification, founded on a transcendent eternal ordering principle. And once you have that, much of what is good about tradition is lost.

This is currently easier to see in Islamic than in Christian fundamentalism. Islamism is widely viewed as “the modern Islam” by young people. That is one of its main attractions: it can explain itself, where traditional Islam cannot. Sophisticated urban Muslims reject their grandparents’ traditional religion as a jumble of pointless, outmoded village customs with no basis in the Koran. Many consider fundamentalism the forward-looking, global, intellectually coherent religion that makes sense of everyday life and of world politics.

Fundamentalism is anti-traditional

Traditional culture is a colorful muddle of customary, local beliefs and practices. The diverse styles of traditional women’s clothing from different Muslim societies, in the illustration at the top of this page, is a fine example. Lacking a system of justification, there is no basis for arguing that other people’s customs are wrong.4

Fundamentalism rejects cultural specificity in favor of abstract universalism. There can only be One Ultimate Truth, which must be the same everywhere, so women everywhere must wear the same clothes. Fundamentalism dismisses actual traditions as “inauthentic” on the pretext that they are degenerations from the authentic, original religion, which fundamentalism claims to represent—thereby inverting the actual order of history.

Traditional cultures have a structure of authority: if you want to know what God wants, you ask a priest; and he knows because he was told by an older or superior priest. There are sometimes quarrels over who gets what position in the hierarchy, but the structure itself is unquestioned and so requires no justification.

Fundamentalism rejects customary authorities in favor of a supposed clear and simple Ultimate Truth. It says the traditional hierarchy is “corrupt” and must be swept away. The structure of justification should replace the structure of institutional authority. Fundamentalism is hostile to ritual, because that reinforces traditional authority rather than simply expressing the Truth.

Sayyid Qutb’s 1964 manifesto Milestones founded modern Islamic fundamentalism. The book’s central claim was that Islam had been entirely extinct for several centuries. All existing “Islam” was actually Jahiliyyah, “paganism,” because (he said) it was not based on Shariah. Or at least not the true Shariah, which only he could discern. All existing fake-Islamic institutions must be destroyed by violent jihad. Somewhat less dramatically, “the absence of strong traditions and institutional ties in [American] Evangelicalism, and its high level of organizational mobility, made it a distinctly modern phenomenon.”5

The Ultimate Truth is to be found in the scriptures, supposedly.6 But the scriptures are pervasively vague, self-contradictory,7 and say lots of things fundamentalists want to ignore. So fundamentalists claim special interpretive insight that gives them the authority to determine what scripture really means. But “this is where the basic contradiction between fundamentalism and true tradition lies. There is no tradition that permits the individual or group, solely on the basis of its own assertion, to proclaim its own knowledge to be infallible and absolute.”8

Fundamentalism is countercultural

Fundamentalism, everywhere, became a significant cultural force only during the countercultural era (1960s-80s). In America, 1970s fundamentalism claimed to be a reaction to the hippie/monist counterculture, which was partly true. However, there was no monist counterculture in the other places where fundamentalisms burst forth, at about the same time. In fact, modern fundamentalism is mainly a reaction to the disintegration of secular systematicity. Each second-wave fundamentalism arose as a desperate, last-ditch attempt to hold meaning together in the face of postmodern nihilism.

Recall that I defined a counterculture as a “new, alternative, universalist, eternalist, anti-rational system.” I’ve explained how the American “Moral Majority” counterculture of the 1970s-80s fit this definition. Here I’ll briefly point out how fundamentalisms in general are countercultural.

Fundamentalisms are new (and anti-traditional) because they are recent and innovative. I’ve described American fundamentalist innovations in “Rejecting rationality, reinventing religion, reconfiguring the self” and “Countercultures: modern mythologies.” I gather the fundamentalists of other religions are similarly inventive, but don’t know details.

Fundamentalisms are all oppositional (alternative) by nature. The early-20th-century ones opposed modernist branches of their religions. The post-1970 ones originated as political responses to secular political authorities. Recently, fundamentalists have taken control of some states; but they continue their oppositional attitude even when they exert totalitarian power. Having vanquished the internal enemy, they organize their rule—rhetorically, at least—around jihad against religious enemies outside their state.9

Fundamentalisms are all universalist, claiming that their Truth applies equally to everyone, and so everyone must behave the same way.10 Fundamentalisms are all eternalist: they claim every tiny thing has a definite meaning, given by the Cosmic Plan, of which they have unquestionable knowledge and understanding. Fundamentalisms are all anti-rational: they oppose secular rationality, and claim to ground all meaning in non-rational transcendent revelation, as given in scripture. They are all systems, in the sense of networks of justifications.

Fundamentalism is losing to postmodernity

Fundamentalism was originally devised as a weapon against liberal Christian modernism: one system of meanings to fight another system of meanings. In the mid-1970s, it was re-deployed as a weapon against two other systems of meanings: the anti-rational monist counterculture and secular rationalist modernism. But, by that point, all three enemies were already dying at the hands of a fourth, more powerful force: postmodernity.

“Postmodernity” means simply that no eternalist system can work any longer. Starting from about 1980, we live in a shattered world: navigating storm-tossed seas among fragments of meaning, mixed up flotsam and jetsam of numerous broken systems. All eternalisms are defenseless against postmodern skepticism.

So, we need to find ways to live without them. Some people built new, smaller, sea-worthy boats—the post-eternalist subcultures—and adapted to postmodernity reasonably well. (At least until atomization hit.) Others—those who found postmodernity most difficult—turned to fundamentalism, for its promise of certainty, of solid dry land. They hoped to preserve a world that makes sense, against the firehose torrent of jagged insanity spewed by the media, and now the internet.

If you understand the defects and dangers of postmodernity, you can sympathize, even if not actually agreeing. Unfortunately, fundamentalism doesn’t work; it can’t work. The deluge is global, and there is no terra firma anywhere.

Most fundamentalists don’t understand the difference between secular modernism and postmodernity. Mostly, they are stuck fighting the last war, with the wrong weapons, against a dead horse. In America, it is way too late to oppose evolution, or sex violence and nasty noises in music, or liberal bias on broadcast TV, or even abortion. Postmodernity doesn’t care about any of that. (Increasingly, conservative Millennial voters say that they don’t consider abortion an important issue.) In fact, polls in the past few years show a sharp decline in fundamentalism, especially among younger, more-atomized, generations. Older fundamentalists recognize, resentfully, that they have lost the culture war.

Third-world fundamentalisms think they are fighting “Western influence,” “neo-colonialism,” or even “Christian crusaders”; but actually the enemy is the atomized global culture, which is as much Asian as Western, and far more capitalist than colonial or Christian. The West can adapt to the breakdown of systems of meaning because we had well-functioning systems for a couple centuries, and spent the twentieth century figuring out why they can’t work anymore. Left behind by modernity, and then by postmodernity, much of the third world never had a working systematic mode, and so now doesn’t understand why that can’t work. As in the West in the 1930s, the obvious response is to try to make eternalism work by force. Fundamentalism and totalitarian nationalism—fused in every third-world version—are attempts. As these fail, they become ever more desperate, and therefore ever more extreme and violent.

ISIS fighters including young Australian recruit

Islamic extremism—originally devised as a coherent system—is atomizing. The things young Islamists say and do make no sense in any conceptual framework, traditional or modern, Islamic or Western. Many Millennial-generation Islamists know the global internet culture better than they know Islam. They are not fundamentalists—following a religion based on scripture—just extremists.

In an upcoming page, I’ll explain how ISIS, the “alt-right,” and “tumblr SJW” all promote politics in the atomized mode—just as the Yippies and the Taliban both pursued politics in the countercultural mode. Since ISIS is pretty much the worst thing in the world now, understanding how this works may be important to fighting it. I’ll suggest strategies for memetic warfare.

My advice to fundamentalists (and others)

As a highly religious person, although not a fundamentalist, I share your concern. The atomization of meaning could result in complete cultural and social collapse.

I suggest that you identify your enemy clearly. If you want to preserve your meanings, you need to come to grips with atomizing postmodernity, which is the current reality, instead of wasting your effort fighting obsolete modernisms.

I suggest that it is more important to find ways of preserving some coherent meanings than fussing about details. I would rather see a competent fundamentalist theocracy that kept civilization running than an anti-systematic social collapse—even though you would burn me as a witch in the first week after you took power. I hope you would prefer living in a competent atheist rationalist state that kept civilization running than see an anti-systematic social collapse—even if it banned all public practice of religion.

“How do we rescue meaning from nihilistic atomization?” is a more urgent question than whether God exists. Scriptural literalism has definitively failed. You and your former secularist enemies might do well to join forces. I realize a fundamentalist-atheist alliance sounds implausible—but before Francis Shaeffer united them in the 1970s, the idea that fundamentalist Protestants, conservative Catholics, and Orthodox Jews would join to fight secularism sounded absurd.

Ross Douthat, a conservative but not fundamentalist Christian, sees a “postmodern opportunity.”11

The Christian gospel originally emerged as a radical alternative in a civilization as rootless and cosmopolitan and relativistic as our own. There may come a moment when the loss of Christianity’s cultural preeminence enables believers to recapture some of that original radicalism. Maybe it is already here, if only Christians could find a way to shed the baggage of a vanished Christendom and speak the language of this age.

“Radical orthodoxy” and the “emerging church” movement are attempting to rebuild Christianity from the ground up—bypassing failing institutions, avoiding culture-war flashpoints, and casting the faith as a lifeline for an exhausted civilization rather than just a return to the glories of the past. Both have a particular interest in reaching the urban, the academic, and even the cool—which points to the possibility of a kind of revolution from above, in which our cultural elite is reconverted and the country comes along.

  • 1. One cannot say exactly when a movement began; that is generally somewhat nebulous. You can trace antecedents as far back as you like; fundamentalism does take inspiration from Luther’s sola scriptura. It would be reasonable to say it began with the publication of The Fundamentals, which became the movement’s manifesto, in the 19-teens.
  • 2. Ross Douthat, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, p. 27.
  • 3. “And all that have not fins and scales in the seas, and in the rivers, of all that move in the waters, and of any living thing which is in the waters, they shall be an abomination unto you: ye shall not eat of their flesh, but ye shall have their carcasses in abomination.”
  • 4. This doesn’t mean traditional cultures are particularly tolerant, just that they don’t use systematic logic to denigrate each other.
  • 5. Countercultural Conservatives: American Evangelicalism from the Postwar Revival to the New Christian Right, p. 28.
  • 6. Alternatively, in capital-T Traditionalism, the Ultimate Truth is manifest in monist mystical revelation. Capital-T Traditionalism is almost perfectly parallel to fundamentalism, except that its religious core is monist rather than dualist. The “hippie” counterculture of the 1960s-70s was also monist, and Traditionalism manages to combine some of the worst features of both the American countercultures. Perhaps because it’s bizarre and repellent at first glance, Traditionalism has had limited success. However, Sedgewick’s Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century argues that it has significantly influenced Islamic extremism. Currently, it is also influential in new Russian and Eastern European far-right movements.
  • 7. Genesis 9:3: “Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything.” How about shrimp?
  • 8. Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity, p. 162. This book casts considerable light on fundamentalism; see my summary here.
  • 9. My guess is that, in each case, state jihadism will gradually become less effective as a way of motivating and controlling the populace. That seems to have happened in Iran, which was the first fundamentalist state.
  • 10. Or, at minimum, everyone within a large religious, national, or ethnic group. Many versions of Islamic and Christian fundamentalism claim dominion over everyone in the world; Jewish, Hindu, and Buddhist fundamentalisms may only demand obedience from all Jews, Hindus, or Buddhists.
  • 11. Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, pp. 278-80.

Counter-cultures: thick and wide

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

The extraordinary accomplishment of the two countercultures of the 1960s-80s was to create new, serious, distinctive, positive approaches to all aspects of life.

Countercultural culture was wide, in addressing every imaginable topic, and in appealing to a broad audience—ideally, everyone. It was thick, in that its treatment of any given topic was substantial, dense, a significant innovation, and woven into one of the two great countercultural themes (monism or dualism) via its structure of justifications.

This contrasts with subcultures, which were narrow: able to address only a few aspects of life, and intended only for a small specific segment of society. As the subcultures progressively fragmented, they also became increasingly thin: they lost the critical mass of creativity needed to develop innovative, deep meanings.

Countercultural culture also contrasts with imploding systematic culture that preceded it. That suffered from a profound loss of confidence, and from a split between “high” culture and “popular” culture. “High” culture had been property of the social elite, but turned against its masters, as the anti-bourgeois artistic avant garde. By the 1960s, that had degenerated into knee-jerk negativity and empty simulations of creation, “a series of increasingly desperate gimmicks by which artists sought to give their work an immediately recognizable individual trademark, a succession of manifestos of despair.”1 Meanwhile, “popular” culture was mainly trivial; and so neither could provide thick meanings. Nihilism seemed a plausible consequence of the loss of the meaning-defining classical high culture of the systematic mode at its zenith.

The countercultures deliberately addressed that nihilism by creating new cultures as serious, positive mass alternatives. This is perhaps the most valuable legacy of the countercultural era.

The countercultures obliterated the obsolete high/pop distinction. Their new art started from popular forms, but also borrowed from the avant garde. Overall, it had greater depth, heft, sophistication, and broad appeal than either.

Some miscellaneous points I will cover

I defined the countercultures as “new, alternative, universalist, eternalist, anti-rational systems.” I noted that rejecting rationality was the central conceptual move of both. Anti-rationality was the key to their contribution to the arts.

Hallucinogenic drugs, whose effects are anti-rational, inspired the monist counterculture’s psychedelic art movement.

This theme goes back to the Romantics, though. They too deployed art as an antidote to the dehumanizing effects of modern employment. The monist counterculture drew heavily on Romantic precedents.

The monist counterculture, particularly, harnessed the creative energy of an entire generation into a thematically coherent culture. The Boomer gonzo attitude of throwing oneself totally into a scene, take-no-prisoners, contributed to its enormous power output. This had good and bad effects. It resulted in unprecedented cultural progress, but also a lot of harmful idiocy, and lasting bitter conflict.

I don’t need to go into any detail on the content, because it’s still omnipresent and familiar. Teenagers today still listen to ’60s bands, half a century later—just as they have in every intervening decade. I won’t be surprised if they still do in another half century. Teenagers have not listened to pop music from the 1940s since the 1940s, and never will again.

One legacy: you can buy almost any product—whether a physical good or a service—in monist or dualist branding. As a random example: holistic dentistry and Christian dentistry. Also, heavy metal.

Everyone in the monist counterculture listened to every genre of popular music. This was consistent with monism, and universalism: music was no longer divided by race, class, ethnicity, or religion. Most subcultures, by contrast, organized around single musical genres. The atomized mode abandoned that again; and now everyone listens to anything. Like this atomized masterpiece, probably the most sublime achievement of Western Civilization:

Why both countercultures failed

Breakup of the galleon Girona
Wreck of the Girona courtesy Notafly

The universalism of the countercultures was their fatal flaw.

No single system of meaning can work for everyone—or even for most people. Both countercultural visions failed to appeal to a majority. They were unable to encompass the diversity of views on meaningness found within societies after the collapse of the systematic mode. Because the countercultures were mass movements, they could not provide community.

When these failures became obvious, the countercultures disintegrated. They were replaced by the subcultural mode, which abandoned universalism, and so was able to address all these problems successfully.

This page explains how the countercultures:

  • failed to find new foundations for their universalist systems
  • … and so were revealed as idealistically impractical
  • failed to address the differences in people’s interests, values, purposes, and needs
  • failed to hold together their coalitions, and so broke up into subcultures
  • failed to provide strong social bonds—only membership in a nation-sized counterculture
  • failed to cope with their partial success
  • failed to transcend their oppositional (counter-cultural) attitude

The subcultural mode developed reasonably effective solutions for each of these problems. I foreshadow each solution briefly here, and describe them in detail in the subcultures section.

Failure to find new foundations

Systematic eternalism depends on a foundation: some eternal ordering principle. On that, it builds a structure of justification, which gives everything meaning. By the mid-twentieth-century, this had clearly failed. Nihilism seemed the only possible alternative.

Both countercultures recognized that the 1950s American mainstream was an empty shell, based on collective pretense, with mere materialism at its core. It might as well be outright nihilism, they thought.

But… there is a more generous way of interpreting the “hypocrisy” of the 1950s. Everyone understood, at some level, that the structure of justification no longer worked. However, everyone also understood, at some level, that just pretending was enough to keep the system working. This was actually right, because there never was a genuine foundation for systematic eternalism. In reality, it had always largely run on ritual: everyone acting as if the system was justified. This is a good thing! The ritual “as if” is the only way functional societies can work.

Unfortunately, by the 1950s, centuries of belief in the myth of ultimate grounding meant no one could admit there was no foundation, even as it became obvious. That meant extreme conformity had to be enforced, lest some child point out “the emperor has no throne” and the whole thing would come tumbling down. Which is exactly what hippie kids did; and so it did tumble down, startlingly rapidly. Belief in the system completely collapsed in the decade between the mid-60s and the mid-70s.

The kids imagined they could build a new eternalism on a new foundation, but they were wrong. They doubled down on eternalism, and lost again. “Everything is totally connected—peace, love, happiness!” didn’t work. Neither did “Jesus is my personal savior!” Both countercultures innovated, but these foundations were not new, and their inadequacy had already been understood a century earlier.

Monism and dualism provided easy-to-understand conceptual themes that temporarily unified the countercultures; but neither actually provided a convincing new system of meaning. Instead, it was this-worldly benefits that gave them mass appeal.

Mainly, the countercultures unintentionally underwrote a relieved regression of their followers into a comfortable pre-systematic mode, implicitly rejecting the new systems created by their leaders. On the monist side: happy greedy piglets sucking at the teats of consumer capitalism, willing to make only symbolic gestures (recycling) toward social/economic transformation. On the dualist side: happily amoral heathens committing adultery, having abortions, and taking drugs, willing to make only symbolic gestures (God talk) toward social/cultural transformation. Leaders of both movements saw these as catastrophic and incomprehensible failures of commitment and discipline.

Subcultures, having abandoned universalism, had freedom to innovate without attempting to justify meanings in terms of any foundation. Some began to abandon eternalism as well, and so to acknowledge nebulosity. Naturally, they ran on ritual and creative make-believe: for example, dressing in an elaborate, distinctive, set style to go to a club where a band played music from a genre specific to the subculture, and everyone danced in the ritually correct manner.

Idealistic, extreme, and impractical

The countercultures had to drop rationality to make their foundational claims seem plausible. This was massively unhelpful. Unmoored from reality, both proliferated idealistic fantasies that the 1950s mainstream would have laughed at. The true believers who tried hardest to put them into practice often ended up psychologically damaged.

Fortunately, the mythologies-you-were-supposed-to-believe weren’t believable. Counterculturalists tried, but eventually most found the contradictions with reality too obvious. By 1975, “if enough of us get high, we can end war” sounded frighteningly stupid, and so the monist counterculture was over. By 1990, “the Tribulation has begun—we must institute Biblical law to fight the Antichrist” sounded frighteningly stupid, and so the dualist counterculture was over.

The countercultures did profoundly transform American society and culture, but most people wound up adopting a pragmatic mixture of their views. On the issues they disagreed about most—for instance sex and gender—the majority compromised between their extremes. It became clear that “men and women are exactly the same by nature and should act that way” wasn’t going to work for most people; but neither would “a woman’s place is in the home.” Similarly, life-long monogamy and endless “free love” would both be nightmares for most people. The majority adopted sequential-mostly-monogamy as their sexual morality. That has no coherent ideological justification, but seems to work for most people.

Sociological surveys suggest that people’s moral judgements are much less divergent than ideologues want—and since discussion is dominated by ideologues, morality is also much less divergent than most people believe. The culture war is mostly for show. “Values” talk functions largely to signal tribal identity and class status.

Each of the extreme positions on sex and gender do work well for small minorities, which formed subcultures. In San Francisco, you should not be surprised to hear “we’re so excited—one of my wife’s female lovers is having a baby!” In New York, you should not be surprised to hear about marriages between teenagers who have had only one chaperoned meeting, arranged by families who have been in America for generations.

Broadly, subcultures abandoned the grand attempt to reform the entire nation to fit an ideological vision. They found solutions that were good enough for a subsociety.

Failure to address diversity

Universalism is necessarily illiberal: it forces a one-size-fits-all system on everyone. People have diverse desires and capabilities, and inevitably the system is wrong for some. Both countercultures aimed for inclusivity, to sweep as many people as possible into their coalition, and attempted to sweep under the rug those who didn’t fit. Both failed: their overarching themes of monism and dualism were not strong enough to hold together disparate populations.

Social inclusivity was a central theme of the monist counterculture. It championed the extension of legal and social equality to broad demographic groups, such as races and sexes. It united a coalition of identity movements (blacks, Chicanos, women, gays) with the claim that The Establishment was the single source of all oppression. Theory promised that all minorities would be liberated simultaneously when the system was overthrown. But, in fact, the interests of these groups often diverged, and leaders of the overall movement (mostly straight middle-class white men) were unable to keep them in line with the broad program.

Monist inclusivity also did not address differences within demographic groups. For example, some women wanted careers, and others wanted to stay home and care for their husband and children. “Equality” was not what homemakers wanted. Within the feminist left, some saw lesbians as the vanguard of liberation; others considered them predatory male-identified threats to women’s solidarity and safety from sexual harassment. This produced the first of many feminist fissions—one of the earliest manifestations of subculturalism. In the subcultural era, the left recognized the inclusive counterculture’s failure to address diversity. It advocated multiculturalism (in effect, separatism) instead.

The monist counterculture advocated “everyone doing their own thing”—a plea to allow diversity after the forced conformity of the 1950s monoculture. That did produce an explosion of cultural creativity; but cynics pointed out that everyone was “doing their own thing” in exactly the same way. The counterculture’s universalism meant you had to wear your hair long and smoke dope and worship Che Guevara to fit in. Punk—the first subculture—sneered at countercultural conformism.

Insofar as the monist counterculture did allow individualism, it sowed the seeds of its own destruction. In the mid-1970s, it fragmented into diverse subcultures, which went their own ways. Some people cared more about politics, and continued that struggle—but often found themselves divided over the meaning of “equality” or how best to achieve it. Others cared more about inner transformation, and pursued their various new religious movements. Many felt burned out and disillusioned, and abandoned monist ideology for getting on with a normal life.

Meanwhile, dualist counterculture leaders also emphasized inclusivity as a consequence of universalism. All women should obey their husbands, regardless of their particular faith. That’s something dualists could all agree on, because men and women are unambiguously different, and so must have dual roles. (Denying the nebulosity of distinctions is the definition of dualism.)

Inclusivity was also dualists’ route to building a powerful political coalition. The main Religious Right organizations, such as the Moral Majority, promoted common cause among Fundamentalists, Charismatics, conservative Catholics, and Orthodox Jews. They also promoted a united front across a wide range of political issues, such as the rights of the unborn, school prayer, gaining military supremacy to defeat global communism, and opposition to pornography, homosexuality, and miscellaneous other sinful sexual deviance.

The dualist counterculture’s ecumenism was a lasting legacy, but the broad agenda was not. General-purpose conservative political action groups found themselves spread too thin to effect change. Different conservatives cared about different issues. They formed single-purpose organizations that proved more effective.

The founders of the Moral Majority genuinely believed they represented that—but in time discovered that they didn’t. Whether or not it was moral, the Moral Majority definitely did not command the allegiance of a majority. At most, about 40% of Americans aligned with their agenda. Likewise, at most about 40% of Americans aligned with the values of the monist counterculture. Of the rest, some were centrists who found some value and some fault in both. But many wished to be left alone, to pursue their own distinctive purposes, as individuals or as subcultures. They were unwilling to be dictated to by moralizing priests and political activists of either persuasion.

Recognizing diversity, and organizing around it, was the essence of subculturalism.

Failure to provide community

Both countercultures promised a brotherhood of all counterculture participants. That was not a workable basis for community, because there were too many participants, and they were too diverse.

Instead, the countercultures provided membership-based tribal identities. Unfortunately, identity is not community, although the countercultures often confused the two. These identities were mainly harmful, I think; they did not provide much commonality or social support within a counterculture, and they accentuated the differences between them. Still, for many participants, they persist to the present day. That energizes the culture war.

In “The personal is political” I explained how each counterculture also attempted to create a level of social organization larger than a family and smaller than a nation-state, to provide the intermediate-scale groups that humans naturally crave. So I won’t go into detail here, but briefly:

  • Monists flocked to rural communes, which mostly failed, for predictable reasons. Those that succeeded became subcultures.
  • Renewed practical support from churches as community-builders was an enduring contribution of the dualist counterculture. Churches are places of ritual, and it is ritual that holds communities together. On the whole, the rump of the dualist counterculture is in better shape now than the monist rump, and church community may be the reason. Megachurches are a particularly successful version. Those function as subsocieties—a distinctive feature of the subcultural mode.

Failure to transcend the oppositional attitude and cope with success

You can’t be a counter-culture if you take over the mainstream. You can’t be romantic rebels if you control the most powerful government in the world. You can’t rail against the culture industry when you run it.

Because the ’50s systematic mainstream was a hollow shell, both countercultures rapidly gained unexpected, albeit partial, success. Unfortunately, they had no realistic plans for what to do when they won (as I explained in “Idealistic, extreme, and impractical” above). What does the dog do when it catches the car? Rebellion becomes ridiculous and dysfunctional.

The monist counterculture railed against capitalism, but its brilliant cultural creations—its music, its graphic design styles, its clothes, its films—were perfect consumer products. Hippies and the culture industry quickly coopted each other, fusing monist values with capitalist commodity fetishism. That diffused holistic peace-love-freedom-wow-man themes throughout American culture, but also distorted and trivialized the most serious achievements. The punk subculture was a reaction to mid-70s corporate rock: the hippies, punks said, had “sold out” to the music business.

Success was a mixed blessing for politics, too. As either movement achieved one of its aims, supporters for whom it was the critical issue—whether ending the draft, or defeating the Equal Rights Amendment—lost interest.

In 1989, Jerry Falwell, the co-founder and public face of the Moral Majority, disbanded the organization, declaring “Our goal has been achieved… The religious right is solidly in place and religious conservatives in America are now in for the duration.” That seemed true. But it was also true that donations had decreased dramatically, as the golden Reagan years dissipated moral panic; and so the Moral Majority was no longer financially viable.

Paul Weyrich had co-founded and named the Moral Majority, and acted as its behind-the-scenes organizational strategist. In 1999, three years into Bill Clinton’s presidency, and ten years after Falwell’s declaration of success, he wrote a brilliant “Letter to Conservatives,” proposing conservative subculturalism:

We probably have lost the culture war. I no longer believe that there is a moral majority. I do not believe that a majority of Americans actually shares our values. If there really were a moral majority out there, Bill Clinton would have been driven out of office months ago.

[We must] look at ways to separate ourselves from the institutions that have been captured by the ideology of Political Correctness, or by other enemies of our traditional culture. I would point out to you that the word “holy” means “set apart,” and that it is not against our tradition to be, in fact, “set apart.” We have to look at a whole series of possibilities for bypassing the institutions that are controlled by the enemy.

The promising thing about a strategy of separation is that it has more to do with who we are, and what we become, than it does with what the other side is doing and what we are going to do about it.

This is a perfect articulation of the subcultural mode, and of its political model: Archipelago. Subcultures are not opposed to each other. They separate from each other in order to pursue their own purposes, without attempting to impose them on anyone else.

Wreckage: the culture war

Wreckage in a sea battle

Both sides of the culture war now believe they are losing.

Both sides are wrong: they lost decades ago.

We all lost.

You don’t need me to tell you that politics has become dysfunctional. That it is polarized by a culture war. That too many people are turning to extremism because their governments can’t get anything done.

Both American countercultures have been dead for more than a quarter century. However, they are still locked in combat as decaying kaiju zombies: the culture war. Their trail of collateral damage scars our social landscape.

Or, as I put it in the introduction to this chapter, the countercultures were galleons built to escape the conflagration of systematic civilization. But galleons are archaic, clumsy, ornately ridiculous vessels, ill-suited to contemporary conditions. With the rejection of rationality, they came unmoored from their foundations. They drifted, collided, and battled, until finally breaking up. Now the wreckage is sinking.

The left and right of current American electoral politics are direct descendants of the 1960s-80s monist and dualist countercultures. In the 2016 Presidential campaign, Trump’s signature issue is “build a wall”—a concrete manifestation of dualism, whose concern is to harden boundaries and sever connections. Clinton responds by advocating “building bridges” instead. She means that metaphorically,1 as a statement of monism, the impulse to eliminate boundaries and connect everything. I think, though, that this may be the last American national election to be fought along the monist-dualist axis.

Overview of this page

The sections of this page are:

We are doing politics wrong
The culture war blocks sensible solutions to urgent and important social, cultural, psychological, and practical problems.
Baby Boomer bafflement
Many people get stuck in the “native mode” of their twenties. The culture war is mainly fought by those who participated in one of the countercultures back in the day, can’t understand why it failed, and are still trying to make it work. This section also summarizes the rest of the page as a series of bullet points.
Let go of the sacred myths of your tribe
The culture war chooses symbols and myths, rather than pragmatic issues, as the battlefield. Sacred abstractions make compromise difficult—but, fortunately, they are not what anyone really cares about.
Why are THOSE PEOPLE so awful?
Because they, like you, are fighting about identity, status, dominance, and tribal survival—not, as both sides claim, “values.”
Disentangling the culture war
If both sides understood what they actually want and care about most, it would help resolve the conflict.

We are doing politics wrong

The social world is going to hell. I don’t need to list the disasters happening just today; check your social media feed for full details.

Politics is supposed to be the way to deal with vast problems and impending catastrophes. It is totally not working. It’s the problem, not the solution.

This is obvious and uncontroversial. For instance, throughout the past five years, polls have found that less than 20% of Americans have approved of the job Congress is doing. Less than 10%, sometimes! Democracy is, by definition, not functioning when most people disapprove of the government. The two Presidential candidates are both loathed, to an unprecedented extent. The major parties, though supposedly representing the monist and dualist value systems, are both widely considered to promote little more than the interests of their corporate donors. Media coverage of politics is awful; deliberately making everything worse in pursuit of advertising dollars. The electorate is hyperpolarized, and Democrats and Republicans hate and distrust each other more than in decades.

This seems to be approaching a breaking point: in many parts of the world, extremist parties, bizarre policies, and absurd candidates are gaining momentum. This reflects not a public desire for extremism, but a revulsion with dysfunctional politics-as-usual, and recognition that fundamental change of some sort is urgent.

Campaign poster: Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords

Tragically, the oppositional attitude of the counter-cultures, and their mirror-image structural duality, was a perfect fit for the American two-party system. In the “Great Rotation” of the meanings of left and right, “values” captured the political process. That removed many important issues from democratic consideration—because they aren’t about “values.” This is, I think, the root cause of current political dysfunction.

It has also been terrific for the ruling class—both politicians and plutocrats. When politics is mostly about sex, drugs, religion, and cartoon frogs, it is much easier to cut backroom deals that capture regulatory agencies and redirect trillions of tax dollars to business interests. So long as a policy question does not line up with the monist-vs.-dualist axis, it is not “political” and therefore can be sold to the highest-bidding lobbyists.

For the past decade, globally, macroeconomic policy has been run largely for the benefit of the financial industry, at an enormous cost to everyone else. This is not a right-vs.-left issue. It is not even a rich-vs.-poor issue. It’s an everybody-else-vs.-the-financial-industry issue. How can subsidies in excess of a trillion dollars a year persist, with no popular support from either the right or the left? Because it’s not about “values,” it is “not political” under the current definition of politics. The Great Rotation removed the single most important policy issue from the democratic process.

Baby Boomer bafflement

The culture war persists largely because most Baby Boomers2 do not understand why their countercultures failed. Although the countercultures have been over for a quarter century, participants on both sides do not accept this obvious fact, and are unwilling to draw any conclusions from it. This refusal is what animates the undead Japanese movie monsters—or, to switch metaphors in mid-ocean, it is the reason doomed navies are still fighting from sinking wrecks.3

Many participants still have a wistful certainty that someday, somehow, the glorious counterculture of their youth will rise again, and its eternal truth and justice will triumphantly replace the corrupt mainstream. (This requires deliberately not-noticing that there hasn’t been a mainstream for decades.) They maintain a rosy nostalgia for the hippie or Reagan eras. They cherish salvation fantasies for the future “after the Revolution,” or “when we take back America.” This is entirely unrealistic, on both sides.

Both sides resent the other as the apparent explanation for their own counterculture’s failure. I suspect one reason the culture war has heated up dramatically in the past few years is that Baby Boomers realize they will pass out of public life over the next decade, and now is their last chance to impose their values on everyone else. It’s the final, desperate push before their time runs out. Realizing that victory is unlikely within their lifetime accounts for some of bitterness of the war.

Maybe understanding that opposition from the other tribe was not the reason for failure can help overcome polarization?

  • Your counterculture did not fail because the other counterculture opposed it. (They did, but that’s not why.)
  • Your counterculture failed because the majority did not agree with it.
  • The majority rejected your counterculture because it was plainly wrong about many things.
  • It would help if you understood how younger generations relate to meaningness; they are right that some of your main issues are illusory.
  • You need to let go of the sacred myths of your tribe. Decades ago they inspired genuinely positive social change, but now they produce only frustration and hatred and stalemate. Everyone born after 1970 thinks they are idiotic. You are stuck pretending to believe, but even you secretly know they aren’t true.
  • Your counterculture and the other one also agree about many things!
  • Some of what you agree about is wrong; you should admit that and drop it.
  • Some of what you agree about is right; you should work together to support it.
  • Much of what you imagine you fight about is symbolic, not substantive. Your advocacy of these issues is mostly a statement of tribal identity, and claims for high status within your tribe.
  • When your symbolic issues blow up into actual political conflicts, often you are fighting to establish tribal dominance, not to accomplish pragmatic improvements in society.
  • If you understand what you really disagree about, and why, you may be able to find pragmatic compromises, instead of both sides demanding total victory.

Let go of the sacred myths of your tribe

Both countercultures were eternalisms: claims about the Ultimate Truth Of Everything that explains all meanings. Eternalism is always harmful: it makes you stupid (because the Eternal Truth is not always so); emotionally, morally, and socially immature; and vicious when you feel you have to defend it even in cases where it’s obviously wrong.

Both countercultures were attempts to rescue eternalism from the threat of nihilism. Both failed, because eternalism can’t work. But when the only alternative seems to be nihilism, any amount of pretense, deceit, and distortion seems justified in defending even a failed eternalism.

The countercultural eternalisms function much like religions, even when, on both sides, they are largely non-theistic (“political correctness,” patriotic nationalism). They are grand narratives that start from the sacred principles of monism and dualism, and elaborate into vast mythologies that are supposed to make the central Truth believable. But the mythologies themselves are not believable,4 and both Truths are false. Continuing to pretend you believe them is morally wrong, not only—but not least—because that pretense has ruined politics.

Some of the hardest-fought culture war battlegrounds are not about “values” as such, much less policy proposals; they are over symbols. That’s what makes it a culture war. Here’s Scott Alexander, in “Five Case Studies On Politicization”:

The Red Tribe and Blue Tribe have different narratives, which they use to tie together everything that happens into reasons why their tribe is good and the other tribe is bad.

Sometimes this results in them seizing upon different sides of an apparently nonpolitical issue when these support their narrative; for example, Republicans generally supporting a quarantine against Ebola, Democrats generally opposing it. [A quarantine is a boundary—the essence of monism vs. dualism.] Other times it results in a side trying to gain publicity for stories that support their narrative while sinking their opponents’ preferred stories – Rotherham for some Reds; Ferguson for some Blues.

When an issue gets tied into a political narrative, it stops being about itself and starts being about the wider conflict between tribes until eventually it becomes viewed as a Referendum On Everything: “do you think the Blue Tribe is right on every issue and the Red Tribe is terrible and stupid, or vice versa?”

Some examples are entirely symbolic.5 A Boomer/countercultural example was flag burning; everyone seems to have lost interest, but that was huge on several occasions over several decades. Current Millennial/atomized examples are the fights over pronouns and dead gorillas.

More typically, symbolic politics contest issues that have some practical importance, but not nearly enough to justify the effort that goes into them; or in which symbolic meanings overlay and distort an underlying practical matter. Abortion—“a condensation symbol for changes in women’s roles, the family, and acceptable sexual behavior”6—is an example I have used repeatedly. I’ve done that because it’s perhaps uniquely central to the culture war.

To be fair to the right, I would like to give an example from the left that is equally important and equally distorted, but I can’t think of one. Gun control is similar in being mainly symbolic: primarily of the culture war itself, but also race, gender, community, and the proper relationship between individuals and the state. However, both left and right are at fault for distorting guns’ meanings and magnifying them far beyond practical import.7 Recycling is a left-only structural parallel to abortion—a moralizing “condensation symbol” for monist conscientiousness—but no one actually cares about it.

Keystone XL was less central than abortion, but still “a top-tier election issue for the 2014 elections for the United States Senate, House of Representatives, governors in states and territories, and many state and local positions as well.”8 In case you missed the fuss, Keystone XL was a proposed oil pipeline. The environmental lobby, and the American left in general, devoted extraordinary efforts to preventing its construction. As far as I can tell, the possible environmental consequences were minor; there are many more important environmental policy questions which the movement has fought much less hard. Although notionally environmentalists’ concern was possible spills, everyone understood that Keystone was symbolically about global warming, and therefore really about global warming—even though everyone also understands that in practice it would have had almost no effect. Other policies affect carbon emissions far more, and might have been altered with far less effort. So why did the left choose to draw a line in the sand at Keystone XL?

In “The toxoplasma of rage,” Alexander suggests an explanation.9 Advocacy groups deliberately choose bad examples because those generate the most controversy. The one they promote is obviously wrong, so the Tweedledum side objects loudly. However, the general principle is considered correct by everyone on the Tweedledee side, so they feel they have to defend it. Their specific arguments are perforce lousy—even if the principle is right—so Tweedledum senses blood in the water and closes in for the kill. But the underlying, broader issue seems critical, so Tweedledee will defend the unconvincing symbolic example to the death. The brutality of the ensuing battle generates huge publicity for the cause. (And also, to be cynical, donations to the advocacy organization, and advertising revenue for the media that cover it and fan the flames.)

If you want to signal how strongly you believe in taking victims seriously, you talk up the least credible case you can find. A rape that obviously happened? Shove it in people’s face and they’ll admit it’s an outrage, but they’re not going to talk about it much. There are a zillion outrages every day. A rape allegation will only spread if it’s dubious enough to split people in half along lines corresponding to identity politics. People start screaming at each other about how they’re misogynist or misandrist or whatever, and your Facebook feed gets hundreds of comments in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS about how my ingroup is being persecuted by your ingroup.10

Wreck of the Birkenhead: rescue from a sinking ship

For both sides, it is obvious that the other mythology is false. That eternalism is a sinking ship. It’s about to disappear beneath the black waves of nihilism.

Secretly, both sides also know their own mythology has been shot full of holes, too. It is taking on water at a terrifying rate—but from the splintered deck you stand on, it looks less bad than the other.

I call out to you:

It’s a pile of water-logged junk; the rest will sink soon; why don’t you come join us in our fleet of nimble new watercraft?

I would like to encourage stuck-in-the-past counterculturalists to learn the later modes of meaningness. Then you can engage with this world, as it is, instead of trying to live in fantasies of what should have happened, decades ago; or maybe will someday happen, if only your counterculture triumphs.

The subcultural mode of relating to meaningness developed effective solutions to many of problems the countercultures tried, and failed, to address. Subculturalism gave rise to other problems, some of which the atomized mode addressed effectively. We now live in a world shaped by these movements.

Many counterculturalists can’t even see the central problems of meaning that younger generations face.11 Looking through a countercultural lens, the only thing that matters is whether the monist or dualist values overpower the other set. From that point of view, the social, cultural, and psychological concerns of younger generations are trivial—because younger people mostly don’t care about monism vs. dualism. But these new problems of meaning are generated by the world we all live in; and they are inescapable, except by retreating into fantasies of total countercultural victory.

Why are THOSE PEOPLE so awful?

They actually are awful. It’s not just that they are the Other Tribe.

Or, at least, they are acting awfully. They are behaving atrociously because they, like you, are fighting about identity, personal adequacy, dominance, and tribal survival. And they, like you, recognize they are losing. When you feel that you are losing a life-or-death struggle, you abandon rules of engagement; any atrocity is justified.

During the countercultural era, political conflict concerned substantive social issues, and genuine differences in values. Nowadays, the zombie culture war is mostly about identity—trumpeting loyal membership in your political tribe—and about your status within that tribe. That means participants have little motivation to engage in actual political struggles. What appears to be politics is often ritual posturing, communicating to one’s own tribe, rather than engaging with the other one. When culture warriors pretend to promote the old myths, everyone knows they are unworkable, so this is mere theatre.

Both countercultures, back then, tried to make membership in the counterculture the main source of identity and of community. This worked badly; the countercultures were too big to function well that way. However, may of the participants still do identify closely with their counterculture, and do still try to take it as their community, or extended family.

On that basis, anything that contradicts the mythology is taken as a personal attack on one’s self, and as violence against one’s clan, rather than disagreement about issues. Unfortunately, this perception is often justified. When the two sides of the culture war do engage, it is mainly just tribal conflict. It’s meta: a fight about the fight itself. The big question is who is going to win, not—as in the ’60s-80s countercultural era—“how can we change society for the better?”

James Davison Hunter coined the term “culture war” in a classic 1991 book. He wrote:

Each side ardently believes that the other embodies and expresses an aggressive program of social, political, and religious intolerance. According to their respective literature, each side has wittingly or unwittingly spawned a political agenda that is antidemocratic and even totalitarian in its thrust.

Both claim to speak for the majority, both attempt to monopolize the symbols of legitimacy, both identify their opponents with a program of intolerance and totalitarian suppression. Both sides use the language of extremism and thereby sensationalize the threat represented by their adversaries.

Perceived threats typically engender a sense of cohesiveness among the threatened members. In the act of opposing an adversary, the community expresses a common moral indignation, and asserts its moral authority anew. Thus, not only is the community drawn together, united as a collectivity, but it is reminded of its heritage, its duty, and its mission to the larger world. Standing against an adversary is the ritual reaffirmation of the community’s identity in the face of what may be a far greater adversary, its own internal moral disintegration. It is part of a natural collective response to the threat of the community’s own structural insecurity and moral instability.12

As I wrote earlier, the moralization of politics has been a disaster. It is reinforced by the two-track class system, which relies on the illusion that you are morally superior to everyone in the other tribe.

When everyone in the other tribe is eeeeevil, they cannot be trusted to honor a compromise. The war can only be a bare power struggle for domination; for total victory; for the outright elimination of the other tribe. Not, in America at least, a literal genocide: but many on both sides of the culture war believe that the country can only be saved when everyone who holds the wrong ideology has been bullied into holding the correct one.

In America, surveys show that both sides are increasingly fearful of the other, and increasingly angry at them. Each side’s perception that their tribe is besieged, threatened, and may not survive, is entirely realistic. Both are probably doomed. Frantic bailing keeps the wrecks above water—but Generation X mostly doesn’t care, and the Millennials are not organized enough to keep ships afloat after the Boomers are gone.

At risk of sounding preachy: all this is Buddhism 101. Confusion leads to fear; fear leads to anger; anger leads to aggression; aggression leads to more confusion, fear, and anger; those lead to death and damnation.

Standing down requires breaking the confusion/fear/anger/aggression cycle. This page and the next try to address the confusion part—which, according to Buddhism 101, is where it always starts, and has to end.

Disentangling the culture war

The culture war can be fun—when you feel like you are winning. Then, there is no motivation to negotiate, compromise, or look for mutually acceptable solutions. However, both sides feel like they are losing much of the time, and most people probably recognize that the culture war is harmful, and should, ideally, somehow, stop. On the other hand, the other side is obviously hateful and wrong, so that doesn’t seem realistic.

Anyway, straight-up compromise is mostly impossible, because there are sacred values involved, and you can’t compromise about sacredness.

Progress has to come from better understanding of what both sides actually care about. That must be disentangled from claims they feel they must defend because it’s part of their contrived mythology. I believe that each tribe’s account of its own values and interests is wrong, so both tribes misunderstand not only what the other side wants, but what they want themselves. When that is clarified, both sides may find that many concrete issues, which they had infused with abstract sacredness, are not critical after all. Having discovered their actual interests, they can negotiate pragmatic solutions.

I don’t have a full understanding of either tribe’s values and interests, but I hope to contribute some insights. I also suggest that recent empirical studies of how people hold sacred moral, political, and religious values have much to offer. I would point to work by, for example, Scott Atran on negotiating with fundamentalists, Jonathan Haidt on the moral psychology of liberals vs. conservatives, and Jason Weeden and Robert Kurzban on political motivations.

It might seem idealistic that either side would be willing to make a serious effort to resolve the culture war. Perhaps so; but it’s important enough that we ought not to rule it out. However… time may have run out. The current culture war is led by Baby Boomers, whose age may make them resistant to new ideas; and anyway they will be aging out of power soon. So maybe it doesn’t matter! On the other hand, a new “echo” culture war has emerged recently, conducted largely by Millennials over social media. The atomized, echo war has some—not all—of the same dynamics as the countercultural one, so some of the same resolution methods may apply.

Much of my analysis is on the next page, “Completing the countercultures.” I apply the fundamental method of the Meaningness book: understanding a conflict in terms of confused stances, disentangling their fixations and denials of meaning, and thereby shifting to a complete stance. That is a bit abstract. The remainder of this section makes some other, tentative, basic suggestions that are not particularly connected with the Meaningness framework.

Disentangling morality from politics would be enormously helpful. This might require a better popular understanding of the functions of morality—both its legitimate and its illegitimate ones. In the culture war, moral judgement functions mainly to maintain self-esteem through self-justification and tribal identification, including demonizing the other tribe.13 That is, you try to convince yourself, and your community, that you are a good person because you are On The Right Side, and you loathe the other tribe more than anyone. Besides the harm done, this actually doesn’t work very well. Self-righteous contempt delivers a momentary confidence boost, but in the long run hatred doesn’t feel all that great. Also, it forces you into constant anxious competition to see who is best at proclaiming tribal dogmas. There are other, better bases for self-esteem. Could we make this common knowledge?

Research14 suggests that the differences in values between the tribes are much smaller than both think. Most supposed conflicts in fundamental values are actually disagreements about concrete issues (is euthanasia OK? is cultural appropriation OK?) that were given symbolic significance through mythological reasoning. Research finds that there are differences in fundamental values, but they are only matters of degree: differing emphasis when evaluating competing moral considerations. For example, Haidt and his collaborators found that conservatives give greater weight to purity, as a fundamental principle, and progressives give greater weight to care for others. (The division between pure and impure is a dualist concern, and connection with others is a monist one.) But everyone recognizes the significance of both.

Arnold Kling, in The Three Languages of Politics, similarly suggests that progressives are primarily concerned with oppression, conservatives with civilization vs. barbarism, and libertarians with freedom vs. coercion. When each group talks politics, they make claims exclusively in terms of one of these moral axes, ignoring the other two. Consequently, they talk past each other; no one hears arguments from the other groups.

On this account, progressivism, conservatism, and libertarianism are all simplistic: they sacrifice moral accuracy for ideological consistency. It is much easier to make moral judgements by taking only one of three factors into account—but you will often get the wrong answer.

Kling’s framework gives me hope: everyone can agree that oppression is bad, civilization is good, and freedom is good. There is no fundamental values conflict: conservatives do not favor oppression, and progressives do not favor barbarism—despite accusations from the other side in both cases. And no one favors coercion for its own sake. In some concrete cases, there are tradeoffs between the considerations; these can be negotiated only when all are recognized and understood.

Several empirical studies suggest that opposing political groups can come to understand each other if they learn to talk in terms of the other side’s preferred fundamental values. Not only that; they can often even change the other side’s mind that way:

We presented two messages in support of same-sex marriage. One message emphasized the need for equal rights for same-sex couples. It is framed in terms of a value—equality—that research has shown resonates more strongly among liberals than conservatives. The other message was designed to appeal to values of patriotism and group loyalty, which have been shown to resonate more with conservatives. (It argued that “same-sex couples are proud and patriotic Americans” who “contribute to the American economy and society.”) Conservatives supported same-sex marriage significantly more if they read the patriotism message rather than the fairness one.

In a parallel experiment, we presented two messages in support of increased military spending. One argued that we should “take pride in our military,” which “unifies us both at home and abroad.” The other argued that, through the military, the poor and disadvantaged “can achieve equal standing,” by ensuring they have “a reliable salary and a future apart from the challenges of poverty and inequality.” Liberals expressed significantly greater support for increasing military spending if they read the fairness message rather than the patriotism one.15

That’s Robb Willer and Matthew Feinberg, in “The Key to Political Persuasion,” summarizing their “From Gulf to Bridge: When Do Moral Arguments Facilitate Political Influence?.” Scott Alexander riffs on another of their papers, on persuading conservatives to care about global warming by using the language of moral purity.

As Willer, Feinberg, and Alexander all note, few people are currently either willing or able to switch moral languages.16 (Partly because political arguments are not meant to persuade the other side: they are meant to demonstrate conformity—or, even better, virtuosity—to your own.) What would motivate more people to learn? Can we agree to reward members of our own tribe for calming down the other?

The ability to coordinate three incommensurable moral systems, or to explain a topic in terms of a system other than your own, may require ethical meta-systematicity. That ability is, unfortunately, uncommon. I’ve also called it “ethical fluidity,” and it’s closely related to the complete stance and the fluid mode. Elsewhere, I’ve suggested the possibility of developing a curriculum that helps people develop meta-systematic cognitive ability, and to transition into fluidity.

Perhaps you’d like to try an exercise? One that might help develop meta-systematic skills, and perhaps propel you toward fluidity?

  1. Write another brief argument—a few sentences—explaining why legal same-sex marriage is a good thing, in terms of the values language preferred by social conservatives: decency, loyalty, sanctity, purity, respect. Make it significantly different from Willer and Feinberg’s “proud and patriotic, contributing to America.” (This is easier than parts 2 and 3: some social conservatives do support same-sex marriage based on fundamental conservative values.)
  2. Write an argument explaining why same-sex marriage should be prohibited, in terms of the values language progressives prefer: oppression, care, fairness, equality. (This is more difficult, but it’s entirely possible—although I doubt you could convince many progressives.)
  3. Explain why same-sex marriage should be prohibited, in the values language libertarians prefer: freedom, procedural justice, rationality. (This question is extra credit for advanced students!)

(This is an “ideological Turing Test.”)

In “The illusion of understanding,” I reviewed research that showed that people think they understand politics much better than they actually do. Experimenters asked people to explain how a proposed policy, which they favored, would work. (Rather than to explain why it is Right!) Mostly, they couldn’t, which led them to realize they didn’t know.

The result was that they expressed more moderate opinions, and became less willing to make political donations in support of the programs, after discovering that they didn’t understand them as well as they had thought. I find this cheering.

Weeden and Kurzban, in research summarized in The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind: How Self-Interest Shapes Our Opinions and Why We Won’t Admit It, find that differing pragmatic interests explain Americans’ political opinions better than differing ideological “values.” Supposed moral considerations are often just rationalizations for advocating government policies that will benefit you and your community (often at the expense of many or most other people).

Their discussion of sexual politics inspired mine in “The personal is political.” Analyzing politics, as I did there, in terms of three competing reproductive strategies may help both sides of the culture war understand each other’s interests, find unexpected areas of agreement, and negotiate pragmatic truces where there are genuine conflicts.17

To recap, the three strategies are:

  1. Opportunistic mating without marriage, and with minimal parental investment—especially, minimal support by fathers. This is most common among the underclass and lower working class.
  2. Early marriage (teens or early twenties); many children, starting shortly after marriage; emphasis on life-long monogamy; and high total parental investment, spread over many children. This large-family strategy became typical in the upper working class and lower middle class.
  3. Marriage and children delayed to late twenties or into the thirties in order to accumulate resources (university education and establishing a career); multiple sexual relationships before marriage; fewer children; highest per-child parental investment. This is typical of the upper middle class.

I found that setting aside “Biblical values” rhetoric, and understanding social conservatism as self-interested advocacy for government support for the large-family strategy, makes me more—not less—sympathetic. I don’t want a large family, but I can now see why people who do would adopt “moral” views that had previously made no sense to me. I don’t have a problem with their pursuing that strategy, so long as they leave others alone to pursue different ones.

Relatedly, Charles Murray points out that upper-middle-class liberals conform to key conservative values better than conservatives do: honest hard work, stable marriages, responsible parenting, and functional community. He advocates that they “preach what they practice,” rather than promoting an ideology that excuses and promotes dysfunctional behavior in the lower classes. This also makes sense to me.18 It could be helpful for both conservatives and liberals to admit that strategies 2 and 3 have much in common, and have things to learn from each other.

On this analysis, both conservatives and middle-class liberals deliberately conflate strategies 1 and 3. It’s rhetorically convenient for social conservatives to lump together everyone else, indistinguishably, as sexual deviants. However, the typical sexual behavior of people pursuing strategies 1 and 3 is entirely different. Middle class liberals, when having casual sex before marriage, are usually careful not to get pregnant; the same cannot be said for the underclass. Conservatives choose, unhelpfully, not to recognize that sexual permissiveness has different consequences for different groups.

At the same time, liberals’ admirable concern for the oppressed leads them to express solidarity with members of the underclass pursuing strategy 1. This may blind them to the realities of underclass dysfunction—notably including the bad consequences of teenage pregnancy and single-parent families. The incentives faced by people pursuing strategy 1 are radically different from those in strategy 3—more different than either is from strategy 2. Pretending otherwise, however well intentioned, does no one any good—including not the underclass themselves.

If it is true that the fundamental issue dividing social conservatives and liberals is early marriage and large families vs. late and small, there are genuine differences of pragmatic interest. Both will naturally want the government and other institutions to support their own strategy. However, if both sides recognize that this is what they really disagree about, perhaps they can agree to let each other get on with their own strategy, and to allow an even playing field rather than demanding policy preferences for their tribe.

  • 1. Which is unfortunate, considering that America needs concrete bridges quite badly. A 2013 study by the American Society of Civil Engineers found that more than one in ten of the country’s existing bridges were not structurally sound.
  • 2. Identifying the Baby Boom generation with counterculturalists is a convenient oversimplification. The monist (hippie) counterculture was almost entirely a Baby Boomer phenomenon. However, the youngest members of the demographic baby boom, born in the late ’50s and early ’60s, were too young to participate, and are not culturally Boomers. The dualist (Evangelical) counterculture was led by the generation before the Boomers. It attracted many Boomers, but also many from the first few years of Generation X, who were born in the second half of the 1960s and came of age in the early 1980s, when the Reagan Revolution was at its peak. Polls find that many of them still identify strongly with the dualist counterculture. However, most people in Generation X overall were, and remain, subculturalists.
  • 3. Jonathan Haidt and Sam Abrams write, in a recent article on political dysfunction: “The end of the Cold War coincided with the baton pass from the Greatest Generation to the baby boomers, who may be more prone to hyper-partisanship. Political views of people in their 50s and 60s are strongly affected by the events they experienced in their teens and twenties. The Greatest Generation – shaped profoundly by the two world wars – entered public life psychologically prepared to put national interests above partisanship, particularly when faced with external threats such as the Soviet Union. But as the last members of that generation retired from public life in the 1990s, they passed the baton to a generation whose political instincts were shaped by the internal American culture war that began in the 1960s. The baby boomers developed their political identities by fighting one another.”
  • 4. The collapse of belief in all grand narratives is the defining feature of postmodernity. The countercultural mode was the last gasp of modernity, and the subcultural mode was the first phase of postmodernity.
  • 5. This does not mean that the underlying issues are unimportant, or that they are not worth fighting over. However, I would suggest that it is more productive to contest a relevant policy proposal, rather than a symbol.
  • 6.Abortion Politics as Symbolic Politics: An Investigation into Belief Systems.”
  • 7. For an unusually sophisticated discussion of the ethics and politics of gun control, see the “No Silver Bullet” special issue of The Critique, with fine contributions from both sides.
  • 8. According to Wikipedia.
  • 9. Alexander doesn’t discuss Keystone XL, but other controversies in which advocates chose peculiarly unconvincing examples to fight over.
  • 10. From “Toxoplasma”; lightly edited for concision.
  • 11. This whole discussion comes out of my experience of trying to explain to American Baby Boomer Buddhists why their invented religion seems irrelevant and silly to Generations X and Y. I’ve found that most younger Buddhists immediately understand and agree with my critique. Most in the Boomer generation can’t hear it. There are exceptions, though! I don’t mean to condemn the whole generation.
  • 12. Quotes from Hunter lightly edited for concision.
  • 13. In The Moral Fool, Hans-Georg Moeller writes: “Morality is the condition of the market of social esteem. Morality is neither customary behavior nor a set of principles, but the actual social differentiation between those who are deemed good and those who are deemed bad or evil.” And: “Morality is not so much an inner conviction that prevents people from doing bad things as a rhetorical device that helps them justify their actions before and after they act. In fact morality often leads people to commit extreme acts in the name of good—that others will view as bad or even evil. The Zhuangzi observes that this is the primary effect of morality. A society in which there is a lot of moral talk will not have fewer crimes. All the moralists in the world have not, so far, prevented war and murder. There is no correlation between more moral talk and a better world. Moral language, in fact, seems to be part of the problem, not the solution.”
  • 14. This discussion is subject to the caveat that social psychology is currently (2016) experiencing a crisis of replicability. Common research methods have been found to be unreliable, and it appears that much of what was thought to be known in the field is not true. I’m not close enough to the field to have an opinion about which of the studies I cite are likely to hold up.
  • 15. Quotes from “The Key to Political Persuasion,” lightly edited for concision.
  • 16. Relatedly, research by Haidt, and by Willer and Feinberg, shows that liberals and conservatives believe they understand each other’s values much better than they actually do.
  • 17. This analysis is highly tentative and may be entirely wrong; but perhaps even then it can show the form of a resolution of cultural conflict through understanding.
  • 18. This does not imply that I agree with most of what he says, there or elsewhere.

Completing the countercultures

Galleon Goteborg reconstruction sailing by London Bridge
Galleon courtesy George Owens

The countercultures of the 1960s-80s took attitudes to boundaries as their central themes. The monist counterculture—the 1960s youth movement—wanted to eliminate all boundaries and level all distinctions; the dualist counterculture, or religious right, wanted to make them absolute.

Meaningness suggests that oppositions between such mirror-image pairs of confused stances can be resolved by complete stances that correct their metaphysical errors. Specifically, monism and dualism share the mistaken idea that boundaries must be perfectly crisp. Participation, the complete stance regarding boundaries, recognizes that they are always both nebulous and patterned. (I’ll explain all this jargon shortly.)

Below, I apply that conceptual framework to two illustrative countercultural battlegrounds: gender and national borders. These are clear, easy, and important examples because:

  • it’s obvious that they are about boundaries
  • it’s obvious that these boundaries are both nebulous and patterned, so everyone already understands and accepts the complete stance
  • except that, even still now, ideologues sway many people by claiming otherwise
  • gender was perhaps the most important cultural issue in countercultural politics1
  • war was perhaps the most important social issue.

The same style of analysis would apply to many other contentious topics. The aim here, though, is not to resolve any concrete issues, but to show how the framework applies in general.

This may seem academic, because after the countercultural era ended most people rejected its most extreme monist and dualist positions. However, it has continuing relevance to our current culture war, which is partly a legacy of the countercultures. I will also preview the ways subsequent modes of meaningness have moderated and complicated the monist/dualist conflict.

Additionally, monism and dualism are confusions of meaning that everyone sometimes falls into personally. Even if this page had no relevance to contemporary politics, seeing how monism and dualism played out decades ago may help understand them psychologically.

Boundaries are nebulous yet patterned

Confused stances are defensive responses to nebulosity. “Nebulosity” is the unstable, uncertain, fluid, complex, and ill-defined nature of all meanings. These properties often seem unwelcome. The lack of any solid ground makes it difficult to build a durable personal identity, social structure, or political movement.

Confused stances are attractive because they deny nebulosity, and attempt to fixate meanings: to nail them in place so they will behave themselves. That is impossible, so the confused stances are all factually wrong and harmful. The culture war “values” issues are exceptionally nebulous, which makes the denial especially counterproductive here.

I have suggested that monism and dualism are the central themes of the two countercultures. These two confused stances concern boundaries: both physical boundaries and the boundaries between categories. Monism denies boundaries and distinctions; dualism fixates them as perfectly sharp.

Boundaries are generally nebulous; they represent real patterns, but are not objectively fixed. So, monism and dualism are both wrong.

Mandelbrot fractal
The boundary of the Mandelbrot fractal is literally infinitely complicated

Boundaries are not merely existent and nebulous, they are complicated. If you imagine putting one under a metaphorical magnifying glass, broadening out and fuzzing the line, you would see the elaborate swirling patterns of sameness and difference in the vicinity: both within and without.

Close to the boundary, it becomes impossible to say which side some items are on. Some also pass through freely; whereas others are stopped. Typically boundaries are selectively permeable.

Both monism and dualism deny complexity, which is part of their appeal. They promise simplicity and clarity. But they can do that only by hiding the variability and ambiguity of reality. It is this complexity which the complete stance recovers.

However, they are both also partly right. Monism recognizes that boundaries are never absolute; dualism recognizes that they are important, and can’t (and shouldn’t) be wished away. It would help cool the culture war if each side could concede what is right in the other’s fundamental stance.

Complete stances neither deny nor fixate meanings. They recognize both nebulosity and pattern: the fact that meanings are, to varying extents, also reliable, distinct, enduring, clear, and definite.

I call the complete stance with regard to boundaries “participation.” It is simply the recognition that boundaries are always both nebulous and patterned. That combines the valid insights of both monism and dualism; which is what makes it “complete.” (The title of this page is a slight pun: ideally, I would like to see the complete stance finish the war between the countercultures; in theory it could do that by including what is right in both of them.)

At an individual, psychological level, the fundamental method for resolving a confusion of meaning is to look for unacknowledged nebulosity; to notice why it is unwanted; to watch how patterns of meaning are fixated and denied in order to avoid recognizing nebulosity; and to work out what it would imply if this nebulosity were acknowledged as inherent and unavoidable, but not a defect in the fundamental nature of reality. “This nebulosity is not a cosmic problem”—maybe not much of a problem at all!—is a summary of all the complete stances. The fluid mode extends this method from the individual to the social and cultural level.

Nebulosity and pattern are both obvious everywhere, so the complete stances are obviously right (and the confused ones are obviously wrong). However, the confused stances are more appealing, so we keep returning to them.

The seeming clarity of the confused stances is particularly appealing—ironically—when you feel stressed and therefore confused. The culture war is stressful; when you feel confused and threatened by challenges to your “values,” you retreat to a simple, extreme view that you know is wrong, but that seems defensible in its absolutism.

Gender

Second-wave feminism emerged during the countercultural era. It focussed initially on workplace equality, and broadened into a general equality movement. The theme of equality—sameness—resonated with the monist counterculture. The two joined in an alliance which evolved into the mainstream left.

Second wave theorists mostly argued that gender was a lie: an imposed and arbitrary social and cultural fiction with no basis in reality. They denied the existence, or at least the legitimacy, of any difference between male and female—sometimes even at the crudest biological level. Even to this day, there are gender-studies professors who claim that it has no physiological or genetic basis whatsoever.

Symmetrically: dualist theorists insisted that men and women are properly, essentially, immutably, and totally different; and that society and culture must reflect and enforce the boundary between them. Even to this day, there are religious leaders who claim that on October 27th, 4004 B.C., God decreed the gender roles of 1950s Topeka Kansas as universal and eternal.

During the countercultural era, when we tried hard to reject rationality, these extreme claims seemed somehow plausible. Once the era ended, the spell broke. Gender can’t be wished away, nor is it ever an entirely hard and fast division.

On average, the sexes are distinct from each other in many ways, but individuals of each sex span the range of variation. Men are diverse; women are diverse. Most men are obviously men and most women are obviously women. Some people don’t fit neatly into either category, for various reasons. There is no essential characteristic that makes someone definitely male or female, masculine or feminine. Most people are reasonably comfortable with the somewhat-different expectations contemporary society and culture have for men and women. A minority find them burdensome. No one conforms to them perfectly consistently—nor can, nor should.

This common-sense understanding, that gender is a strongly patterned but nebulous distinction, is the unexciting core of a complete stance. Most people now accept it—implicitly, at least. Both countercultural approaches are obviously wrong. Despite some irritations, the mingled ambiguity and definiteness of gender isn’t a big problem for most people most of the time.2 It’s mostly only professional ideologues and committed amateur culture warriors who still promote absolutist monist or dualist views.

Since the end of the countercultural era, subculturalism and atomization have further complicated the meanings of gender. The lesbian sex wars split countercultural second-wave feminism into numerous subcultural third-wave sects, which took diverse stances on the metaphysics of gender, with further contributions from LGBTIQA movements. In atomization, intersectional fourth-wave feminism lost coherence, and deploys whatever shards of contradictory, shattered subcultural ideologies are convenient in the moment. I will discuss these developments later in the book.

And what of the fluid mode, which supposedly reflects the complete stance? I’ll give a brief account here, which may seem incomprehensible at this point; the fluidity chapter should make it clear.3

Let’s go back to the metaphor of putting a boundary under a magnifying glass to see the details of its complex nebulosity. On the micro scale, gender manifests in a pattern of interaction between specific people in a specific situation at a specific time. Observed carefully, one sees that what counts as a masculine or feminine way of interacting is a continually renegotiated, ongoing accomplishment of the participants. This does not mean it is arbitrary; indeed, it is responsive to the particulars of the situation in exquisitely fine detail. It is also, usually, so routine that it goes unnoticed. It is only when it breaks down that the nebulosity of gender comes momentarily into consciousness—before participants more-or-less skillfully repair the breach and restore its ordinary smooth operation.

This micro-level continual re-accomplishment necessarily orients to macro-scale universalist ideologies. In no social situation can we be entirely unconscious of numerous, diverse theories of what all men and women always are, or always ought to be. We can never act without some awareness of how our actions will be interpreted as meaningful according to those accounts. However, our micro-scale activity—what we say, how we say it, our body language—is never governed by any of these ideologies. They are social facts we have to work with, but not systems of rules we could conform to, even if we wanted to. Besides their extensive contradictions with each other and with obvious realities, they are not specific enough to guide action in concrete situations. They require extensive interpretation in order to become relevant. Yet we cannot choose not to perform that interpretation.

Because gender is patterned, we can never be perfectly free of it—as many second-wave feminists hoped. Because it is nebulous, we can never perfectly embody it—as many religious conservatives hoped. Between these extremes, there is an open space, in which we can take a comfortably playful attitude to choice. We all continually construct gender together; we may as well enjoy making it a collaborative work of art when we can.

Although almost no one maintains a hardcore monist or dualist gender ideology consistently, there’s always a tug toward them, because they simplify thinking. When trying to win an argument, it’s always tempting to say “well, there’s no real difference between men and women, so…”; or “despite shared humanity, men and women have totally distinct proper roles, so…”—and people do say both these things frequently. It would be helpful to accomplish a cultural consensus that we don’t believe these things, so we should stop saying them and acting as though we did.

That would help clarify specific conflicts, because monism and dualism obscure the practicalities. Although some gender issues are important practically, the culture war imposes imaginary additional meanings to co-opt them as ideological battlegrounds, fought from essentialist monist or dualist positions, making them into Giant Referendums On How The Other Tribe Is Wrong About Everything.4 In the 2016 trans bathroom controversy, for instance, this was clearly deliberate: an engineered conflict, designed to increase ideological hostility among voters.

Dropping monism and dualism would still leave plenty of room for disagreements; but they would have to be argued on specific, practical grounds, instead of abstract, metaphysical ones. The complete stance itself answers no practical questions. It leaves open issues such as “what constitutes workplace equality” and “who uses which bathrooms.” However, it points out that these issues don’t have to be so goddamn serious, and that the big-picture ideologies are all quite childish and silly.

Trans issues have come to new prominence in American politics in the past couple of years, with the “TERF wars” and court battles over bathroom use. Trans people are also theoretically interesting for forcing metaphysical questions about gender boundaries: what does it even mean to ask whether they are male or female?

Most people are willing to admit that trans people have some characteristics of both genders, but many also insist that the essential determinant is one particular characteristic. That’s the “real” one. What makes that one special?

Some dualists5 would like to point to some physical characteristic, like maybe the Y chromosome, as essential. But what basis is there for that? The Bible has nothing to say about chromosomes; this can’t be a religious claim. Y chromosomes correlate statistically with penises, social dominance, and various other typically-masculine characteristics. However, there are some people with Y chromosomes whom everyone believes from birth to be female, because there’s no indication—physical or mental—of masculinity, apart from the chromosome itself. And vice versa.6

Some monists would like to say that, since there no differences between men and women other than what is oppressively imposed by culture and society, you are whatever gender you say you are, and everyone must agree and treat you that way. Just as progressives were coming to a consensus on this point, it got complicated by an apparent analogy with Rachel Dolezal, who is trans black. Her career as an NAACP chapter president and university Africana Studies teacher was disrupted when her white parents pointed out that she was born white, with blue eyes and blond hair, and has no black ancestors. She continues to insist that she is really and essentially black because she self-identifies as black, and feels black on the inside.

Some social justice activists agree that she is, indeed, authentically black, and transracial identity is totally valid. Most do not. Many transgender people have written essays arguing that any claimed parallel between transracial and transgender identity is spurious. I’m sympathetic politically, but philosophically I think this is a hard case to make.7

Recognizing that gender can’t simply be wished away, I think it is reasonable to balk at the idea that someone is of a particular sex simply because they say so. On the other hand, recognizing that there is no objective fact about what sex anyone is, I think it is reasonable to agree that anyone who passes as a particular sex might as well be treated as being that sex for most purposes. Further, as far as those who present androgynously or as “none of the above,” we might do well to say “whatever!” and let them get on with it. One is entitled to disapprove of “deviants dressing wrong” privately, if that is your opinion, but eccentric attire is rarely adequate grounds for public censure. (“This nebulosity is not a cosmic problem!”) In all three cases, insisting that there is some Ultimate Truth of gender that must be obeyed is metaphysically unsupportable, and also seems petty.

It would help if we could agree that gender is a private matter, thereby restoring part of the public/private boundary that the countercultures destroyed. Although the public/private boundary is necessarily nebulous, other people’s ways of doing gender are mostly none of your business. This is obvious as a criticism of the right, but it applies equally to the left. For example, some leftists are harshly judgemental of women who choose to be supported by their husbands; this is wrong.

Sovereignty, borders, and war

The concept of a sovereign state was invented in the systematic era. Its Westphalian model is an epitome of dualism. It holds that there are precisely-defined, permanent borders between states. Every square inch of land is part of exactly one state, and shall remain so eternally. The government of a state holds sway uniformly at every point within its borders. It has no right to exert any influence beyond its state borders.8

This is highly unnatural; choiceless era kingdoms worked quite differently. Borders were mostly vague and shifting, and while the king’s rule may have been absolute in the capital, his power faded gradually, informally, with distance. The main job of a king was to meddle in the affairs of neighboring kingdoms, which led to wars and/or border adjustments.

The Westphalian system was invented to prevent war.9 The First World War marked the end of the systematic era, and the beginning of the era of crisis and social breakdown. Not only did Westphalian sovereignty fail to prevent the World Wars, it arguably caused them.

The dualistic Cold War profoundly shaped the countercultural era. Opposition to the Vietnam war—a proxy battle of the Cold War—was one of the main drivers of the monist (hippie/student radical) counterculture. The Reagan administration’s anti-Soviet military buildup was one of the main drivers of the dualist counterculture.

A monist approach would eliminate national boundaries. Wars are between states; without countries and borders between them, there could be no wars. Lennon’s lyrics for “Imagine” express this view; his last line, “the world will live as one,” is the epitome of monism. I do say he was a dreamer: countries and borders cannot be wished away.

Nor are they ever entirely hard and fast divisions. Many states attempted isolationism in the mid-20th-century, but it is impossible. Only North Korea even pretends now, and it is heavily dependent on China.

Beginning around the end of the countercultural era, which coincided with the end of the Cold War (1991), diplomats and international institutions quietly revised the system of international relations, to reflect the obvious reality that states and borders are patterned but nebulous. The European Union (1992) developed a model for blurred sovereignty, with borders that remain existent but enormously more permeable than previously. The World Trade Organization (1995), and the series of treaties it sponsored, greatly increased both the permeability and complex selectivity of borders. The Rwandan (1994) and Bosnian (1995) genocides changed the minds of many anti-war leftists, and de facto established the principle that the great powers have not only the right but the responsibility to intervene in the internal affairs of sovereign states to prevent humanitarian catastrophes. As dualists had always insisted, bad guys are bad and can’t be wished away; and wars can be fought for noble causes. More recently, failures in the Middle East have convinced many rightists that—as monists had always insisted—many wars cannot be won by military force.

Maybe it counts as success that in the current politics of the developed nations, global trade and immigration have mainly replaced war as the political issues concerned with borders.

This new era of international relations remains a work in progress, and probably always will. It has gotten many details wrong; but the principle that national borders are both nebulous and patterned is significant progress. As with gender, the meanings of national boundaries must be continually renegotiated, and interpreted in specific situations with reference to multiple ideologies. Almost everyone now does accept that national boundaries are both necessary and necessarily permeable. The Westphalian framework lingers as a ritual fiction; or as a subordinated system to which the new de facto non-systematic international relations are meta.

Popular ideologues sometimes talk as if totally open or closed borders were feasible options. And even the more careful pundits often frame the fight as quantitive: a more open border, or a harder one? Such rhetoric appeals to monist and dualist sensibilities, but is unrealistic, unhelpful, and nearly meaningless. Workable answers concern the complex pragmatic specifics of how borders operate. Which people, goods, services, money, and armies are allowed to cross, for what reasons?

Later in Meaningness and Time, I will discuss how the subcultural, atomized, and fluid modes regard nation-states.

  • 1. I’ve suggested tentatively that the culture war may be primarily about reproduction, with the rest mere decorative obfuscation. And, regulating gender roles seems to be mainly an indirect way of regulating reproduction.
  • 2. The word most is important. Suffering can be extreme for those who accept the nebulosity of their gender, but find it rejected by others; and for those who recoil from, and cannot accept, the nebulosity of their own gender, or that of people they care about.
  • 3. This account draws heavily both on ethnomethodology and on Kegan’s account of “stage 5” as context-responsive non-systematic activity that is meta to multiple formal systems.
  • 4. I’ve taken this trope from Scott Alexander’s “Five Case Studies On Politicization.”
  • 5. Gender essentialists include both some conservative Christians and some radical feminists, who have allied on many sexual deviance issues since the mid-1970s. I have to admit I find this very funny.
  • 6. The biochemical mechanisms that typically result in either a “male” or “female phenotype” are extremely complicated and currently not fully understood. There is definitely no single “master factor” that determines maleness or femaleness in humans.
  • 7. All the attempts I read actually argued instead that claiming to be black when you were born apparently white is morally wrong, because you aren’t really black; whereas claiming to be female when you were born apparently male is not morally wrong, because you are really female. This simply assumes by fiat the conclusion it then claims to prove.
  • 8. The Westphalian scheme has never been descriptively accurate—never mind prescriptively adequate—even for the core European countries that invented and adopted it. The Channel Islands and Andorra are two entertaining anomalies. The Channel Islands are legally part of Duchy of Normandy, which has not existed for many centuries. They are not part of the United Kingdom, although they are self-governing possessions of the British Crown, and Queen Elizabeth II is their Duke. (Not their Duchess. I imagine there is an excellent reason for this.) Islanders are legally both British citizens and EU citizens. The Channel Islands are legally part of the British Islands, but not part of the British Isles (please don’t confuse these!). They are not members of the European Union, but remain part of the European Community, which hasn’t existed since 1993, but which continues to grant them important legal trade rights from beyond the mortal veil. There’s much more, but it starts to get complicated. Andorra is legally a Parliamentary Co-Principality, with the President of France and the Bishop of Urgell in Spain as Co-Princes. It is not part of either France or Spain. The President of France, ex officio Prince of Andorra, is a reigning monarch, unelected by his or her subjects (but elected by the French people). Then it gets complicated.
  • 9. It takes its name from the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the catastrophic Thirty Years War—Europe’s worst before WWI, with many millions left dead.

Subcultures: the diversity of meaning

Punks: the first mass elective subculture
Punks courtesy Paul Townsend

The subcultural mode marked a fundamentally new approach to meaningness. It abandoned universalism—the delusion that meanings must be the same for everyone, everywhere, eternally. It recognized that different people are actually different, and need different cultures, societies, and psychologies.

The subcultural mode also created subsocieties: a new mode of social organization, intermediate between the family and state. Membership in subsocieties was voluntary, based on emotional affinity and cultural enjoyment, rather than ethnicity or geography. Subsocial organization began to resolve the problems of the self/society relationship that the countercultures tried, and failed, to renegotiate.

The first several pages of this chapter explore subcultural solutions: how subcultures addressed the problems of society, culture, and self that followed from the wreck of counterculturalism. These approaches were, I think, almost right.

However, they were also inadequate, and doomed. The remaining pages explain why the subcultural mode proved unworkable, and inevitably disintegrated into the atomized mode.

The fluid mode will need to recover what worked in the subcultural mode, while addressing its flaws and limitations.

Subcultural solutions

Examples provide some intuitive understanding of subcultures: punk, Wicca, goth, anarcha-feminism, SF fandom, straight edge, BDSM, New Romantic.

Subcultures were not just hobbies or musical genres; they were ways of being. They provided the same kinds of life-meaning that the systematic and countercultural modes did—but more so. You were not stuck with the universalist monoculture of a nation; you could choose a subculture that was particularly meaningful for you. Ideally, they combined a distinctive artistic style, religion, politics, ethics, social role, belonging and identity.

Whereas the countercultures:

  1. failed to find new foundations for their universalist systems
  2. … and so were revealed as idealistically impractical
  3. failed to address the differences in people’s interests, values, purposes, and needs
  4. failed to provide strong social bonds—only membership in a nation-sized counterculture
  5. failed to transcend their oppositional (counter-cultural) attitude

Subcultures, in contrast:

  1. felt no need for foundations or justifications, having abandoned universalist claims
  2. made no attempt to solve the Big Problems of nation-sized societies and cultures
  3. affirmed and enhanced the diversity of interests, values, purposes, and needs
  4. provided strong social bonds within human-scale subsocieties of like-minded people
  5. were refuges from social conflict, because subcultures had no reason to oppose each other

Subcultural failure: boundary issues

Although subcultures still exist, they no longer function as they did during the subcultural era (1975-2000). It’s mostly no longer possible to rely on one to define your cultural, social, and personal identity.

Each subsociety created a boundary, between its members and the rest of the world. Each subculture also created a boundary: between its meanings and meanings that did not belong. Getting these boundaries right was critical, but difficult.

To function, the boundaries had to be somewhat permeable, but not too permeable. A subsociety needs to allow in a trickle of new members, to replace drop-outs and to allow for manageable growth. If the boundary is too rigid, the group will dwindle and collapse. If the boundary is too vague, members are not sufficiently committed, and also the group can suffer from dilution by mass immigration when its culture becomes popular.

A subculture needs to be somewhat open to new ideas, as a source of creative friction and innovation, but it also needs to maintain sufficient distinctiveness to avoid merging into others.

Subcultures and subsocieties also tended to schism, creating new internal divisions. The resulting, smaller sub-sub-cultures often lacked critical mass: enough talented people to create enough meaning.

The best size for a social group is a few hundred people: big enough to provide reliable support, but small enough that you can find a unique role, valued by all members. The best size for a culture is millions: enough to supply thick meanings for all dimensions of being.

This mismatch meant that either subcultures blew up into mass movements (as the most successful musical genres did) which offered little social support; or, if they remained small, the meanings they could provide were too narrow and too thin.

Finally, there were problems at the interface between the subculture or subsociety and nation-sized institutions such as the state, mainstream religions, and the market economy. Neither side understood the other’s needs, or even acknowledged the others’ legitimacy. States and religions sometimes persecuted subcultures as challenges to their authority; exploitation by the culture industry was often even more destructive.

On the other hand, subcultures did not even try to provide all the functions of large systematic institutions. That made the mode parasitic: a fully subcultural society is not possible, because subcultures and subsocieties cannot do the work of states or large corporations.1

Most subcultures and subsocieties had little awareness of these problems—much less adequate tools to address them. By around the year 2000, however, most people felt intuitively that subculturalism had failed.

After subculturalism

The atomized mode simply dropped the subculture and subsociety boundaries. Now everyone could access all culture, globally, through the internet. You didn’t have to be a member of a tribe to listen to a particular kind of music. You could take any shard of art and remix it with anything else.

Destroying the tiresome narrowness and shallowness of subculturalism gave an exhilarating sense of freedom. Not only could you take any meaning from anywhere (breadth), you could explore it in unprecedented depth.

Unfortunately, with boundaries gone, all coherence was lost. In the atomized mode, nothing makes sense. We live now in a world of decaying systematic institutions, facing atomized peoples, with mutual hostility, paranoia, and incomprehension.

The fluid mode, ideally, combines the strengths of all previous modes. Like the systematic mode, it should support nation-sized institutions, to provide necessary social, cultural, and physical infrastructure. Like the countercultural mode, it should support innovative cultural production that is wide, deep, and (like the subcultural mode) diverse. It should support close-knit, voluntary subsocieties of an optimal size. Like the atomized mode, it should allow everyone access to all cultural products.

  • 1. In “Archipelago,” I discuss a hypothetical model for how subcultures and nation-sized systems could have coexisted harmoniously, and supported each others’ proper roles. Unfortunately, this potential utopia was not attempted.

Subcultures: meanings at play

Steampunk image of girl with airship
Image courtesy stephane

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

The subcultural mode of relating to meaningness recognized what earlier modes denied: that people are different, and different sorts of people flourish in different cultural and social surrounds.

The systematic and countercultural modes were universalist: they tried to force a single culture on everyone. To answer “why?,” they had to construct an eternalist structure of justifications, supposedly founded on some ultimate cosmically correct principle.

Subculturalism abandoned all that. Steampunks had no interest in reforming society so that everyone would wear vernier goggles and ride in zeppelins. To the question “why steampunk?” there are only individual answers (“I’m into it because…”). Justifications turn on nebulous aesthetic criteria (“ray guns are not strictly Victorian, but this one is brass”), not some absolutist Cosmic Plan.

There have been subcultures for as long as there have been cities. Mainly they were ethnic or sectarian. You were born into them; leaving and joining was difficult; there were only a handful in any place; and their influence on the mainstream culture was small.

In the 1980s, subculturalism exploded outward. The new subcultures were composed mainly of 20-somethings and were chosen freely. They multiplied dizzyingly, and replaced the countercultures as the mode of cultural innovation and production.

Freed from the demand to justify universal claims, many of the subcultures implicitly or explicitly abandoned eternalism. Some implicitly or explicitly embraced nihilism—notably, many in the early days of punk, the first subculture of the era.

The subcultures mostly also declared themselves free of responsibility for worrying about the Big Social Problems generated by the systematic mode. The countercultures arose as earnest attempts to solve those problems—and failed. Punk aggressively refused to offer any alternative. Later subcultures simply ignored them. Subcultures are about “us,” our deliberately human-scaled subsociety; not about “mundanes,” the society-at-large whose problems seem hopeless, or at any rate beyond our abilities.

Freed from responsibility, subculturalism is explicitly play. Unlike the countercultures, which took themselves Very Seriously, subcultures reveled in absurdity. This made for great art—in my opinion, as someone for whom the mode is more nearly native than any of the others. It also enabled a welcome shift from sincerity to ritual, which started to resolve some of the pathologies of self, which systematicity produced and the countercultures failed to overcome.

Choosing to ignore the broader society and its problems made the subcultural mode parasitic. Someone else had to keep the machinery of civilization running while the subcultures played dress-up and make-believe. Failure to develop mutually-beneficial relationships with nation-scale institutions, and with individuals outside the subculture, contributed to the mode’s downfall. A nation cannot long persist if its best and brightest devote themselves to frivolities.

Fortunately, practicality and absurdity are not incompatible; the boundary between them is nebulous. The fluid mode must combine playfulness and seriousness, ritual and sincerity, inseparably.

Archipelago: subcultural politics

Map of an imaginary archipelago
From Scott Alexander’s map of Raikoth, by permission

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

If subculturalism had worked, Archipelago would have been its natural political expression. Understanding why each cannot work casts light on the other—and on how we can do better in the fluid mode.

I have stolen the term “Archipelago” from a brilliant essay by Scott Alexander, “Archipelago and Atomic Communitarianism.” Mostly this page will encourage you to go read that. I’ll also give a bit of a summary, and draw out the connections with subculturalism (which he also made explicit, but not in as much detail).

(The nautical implications of “archipelago” also fit with the sea-of-meaningness trope I have stolen from Will Buckingham’s Finding Our Sea-Legs, which inspired my description of the “fluid mode” and my caricaturing the countercultures as “wrecked galleons.”)

The ultra-condensed summary of Archipelago is this. People have radically different opinions about how society should be organized. Probably many of these ideas are right—for different sorts of people. So, ideally, everyone who wants to live in a fundamentalist theocracy can go do that, and everyone who wants to live in a socialist welfare state can go do that, and everyone who wants to live in rationalist capitalist minarchy can go do that. If we had many spare islands, each type of society could set up on a different one, and not step on each others’ toes. We don’t, so there would need to be an overarching governmental structure whose main job was to keep the different systems from interfering with each other.

As Alexander writes, Archipelago “doesn’t look like a practical solution for real problems.” However, “I do think it’s worth becoming more Archipelagian on the margin rather than less so, and that there are good ways to do it.”

I agree. So this page will use the Meaningness and Time framework to analyze the obstacles to Archipelagian developments, and to suggest possible approaches to working around them.

In terms of ideology (rather than practicalities) the principal obstacle is universalism. That is the idea that meanings must be the same for everyone, everywhere. The countercultures both took universalism to an extreme, and spawned the culture war that has plagued us since.

The countercultural mode is native for the Baby Boom generation. Currently, most major institutions (particularly governments) are led by Baby Boomers. Statistically, they are far more politically polarized than subsequent generations—because they are committed to universalism, and so to imposing their political vision on everyone else.

Over the next decade, Generation X will inherit control of states and other major institutions from the Baby Boomers. The subcultural mode is native for Generation X—which suggests that politics may soon shift toward a more Archipelagian, and less polarized, model. I think this will be a good thing!

In the meantime, Gen X has been, famously, “waiting on the world to change.” Compared with both Boomers and Millennials, Generation X has tended to sit out politics—because their subcultural orientation has had no possibility of political implementation.

Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution

Mop
Image courtesy Wikimedia

Subcultures are dead. I plan to write a full obituary soon.

Subcultures were the main creative cultural force from roughly 1975 to 2000, when they stopped working. Why?

One reason—among several—is that as soon as subcultures start getting really interesting, they get invaded by muggles, who ruin them. Subcultures have a predictable lifecycle, in which popularity causes death. Eventually—around 2000—everyone understood this, and gave up hoping some subculture could somehow escape this dynamic.

(You can read very brief previews of my analysis of subculture dynamics in this table and/or this page.)

The muggles who invade and ruin subcultures come in two distinct flavors, mops and sociopaths, playing very different roles. This insight was influenced by Venkatesh Rao’s Gervais Principle, an analysis of workplace dynamics. Rao’s theory is hideous, insightful nihilism; I recommend it.1

The birth of cool

Before there is a subculture, there is a scene. A scene is a small group of creators who invent an exciting New Thing—a musical genre, a religious sect, a film animation technique, a political theory. Riffing off each other, they produce examples and variants, and share them for mutual enjoyment, generating positive energy.

The new scene draws fanatics. Fanatics don’t create, but they contribute energy (time, money, adulation, organization, analysis) to support the creators.

Creators and fanatics are both geeks.2 They totally love the New Thing, they’re fascinated with all its esoteric ins and outs, and they spend all available time either doing it or talking about it.

If the scene is sufficiently geeky, it remains a strictly geek thing; a weird hobby, not a subculture.

If the scene is unusually exciting, and the New Thing can be appreciated without having to get utterly geeky about details, it draws mops.3 Mops are fans, but not rabid fans like the fanatics. They show up to have a good time, and contribute as little as they reasonably can in exchange.

Geeks welcome mops, at first at least. It’s the mass of mops who turn a scene into a subculture. Creation is always at least partly an act of generosity; creators want as many people to use and enjoy their creations as possible. It’s also good for the ego; it confirms that the New Thing really is exciting, and not just a geek obsession. Further, some money can usually be extracted from mops—just enough, at this stage, that some creators can quit their day jobs and go pro. (Fanatics contribute much more per head than mops, but there are few enough that it’s rarely possible for creatives to go full time with support only from fanatics.) Full-time creators produce more and better of the New Thing.

The mop invasion

Fanatics want to share their obsession, and mops initially validate it for them too. However, as mop numbers grow, they become a headache. Fanatics do all the organizational work, initially just on behalf of geeks: out of generosity, and to enjoy a geeky subsociety. They put on events, build websites, tape up publicity fliers, and deal with accountants. Mops just passively soak up the good stuff.4 You may even have to push them around the floor; they have to be led to the drink. At best you can charge them admission or a subscription fee, but they’ll inevitably argue that this is wrong because capitalism is evil, and also because they forgot their wallet.

Mops also dilute the culture. The New Thing, although attractive, is more intense and weird and complicated than mops would prefer. Their favorite songs are the ones that are least the New Thing, and more like other, popular things. Some creators oblige with less radical, friendlier, simpler creations.

Mops relate to each other in “normal” ways, like people do on TV, which the fanatics find repellent. During intermission, geeks want to talk about the New Thing, but mops blather about sportsball and celebrities. Also, the mops also seem increasingly entitled, treating the fanatics as service workers.

Fanatics may be generous, but they signed up to support geeks, not mops. At this point, they may all quit, and the subculture collapses.

The sociopath invasion

Unless sociopaths5 show up. A subculture at this stage is ripe for exploitation. The creators generate cultural capital, i.e. cool. The fanatics generate social capital: a network of relationships—strong ones among the geeks, and weaker but numerous ones with mops. The mops, when properly squeezed, produce liquid capital, i.e. money. None of those groups have any clue about how to extract and manipulate any of those forms of capital.

The sociopaths quickly become best friends with selected creators. They dress just like the creators—only better. They talk just like the creators—only smoother. They may even do some creating—competently, if not creatively. Geeks may not be completely fooled, but they also are clueless about what the sociopaths are up to.

Mops are fooled. They don’t care so much about details, and the sociopaths look to them like creators, only better. Sociopaths become the coolest kids in the room, demoting the creators. At this stage, they take their pick of the best-looking mops to sleep with. They’ve extracted the cultural capital.

The sociopaths also work out how to monetize mops—which the fanatics were never good at. With better publicity materials, the addition of a light show, and new, more crowd-friendly product, admission fees go up tenfold, and mops are willing to pay. Somehow, not much of the money goes to creators. However, more of them do get enough to go full-time, which means there’s more product to sell.

The sociopaths also hire some of the fanatics as actual service workers. They resent it, but at least they too get to work full-time on the New Thing, which they still love, even in the Lite version. The rest of the fanatics get pushed out, or leave in disgust, broken-hearted.

The death of cool—unless…

After a couple years, the cool is all used up: partly because the New Thing is no longer new, and partly because it was diluted into New Lite, which is inherently uncool. As the mops dwindle, the sociopaths loot whatever value is left, and move on to the next exploit. They leave behind only wreckage: devastated geeks who still have no idea what happened to their wonderful New Thing and the wonderful friendships they formed around it. (Often the geeks all end up hating each other, due first to the stress of supporting mops, and later due to sociopath divide-and-conquer manipulation tactics.)

Unless some of the creators are geniuses. If they can give the New Thing genuine mass appeal, they can ascend into superstardom. The subculture will reorganize around them, into a much more durable form. I won’t go into that in this blog post. I will point out that this almost never happens without sociopaths. An ambitious creator may know they have mass-appeal genius, and could be a star, but very rarely do they know how to get from here to there.

Resistance

So what is to be done?

This is a geek question. The subculture lifecycle is a problem only from a geek perspective. As far as mops are concerned, it provides reliable, low-cost waves of novelty entertainment and casual social relationships. As far as psychopaths are concerned, it generates easily-exploited pools of prestige, sex, power, and money.

From a utilitarian point of view, mops hugely outnumber geeks, so in terms of total social value, it’s all good. Can’t make omelettes without breaking some eggheads.

So what is to be done?

Geeks can refuse to admit mops. In fact, successful subcultures always do create costly barriers to entry, to keep out the uncommitted.6 In the heyday of subcultures, those were called poseurs.7 Mop exclusion keeps the subculture comfortable for geeks, but severely limits its potential. Often there’s a struggle between geeks who like their cozy little club as it is, and geeks who want a shot at greatness—for themselves, or the group, or the New Thing. In any case, subculture boundaries are always porous, and if the New Thing is cool enough, mops will get in regardless.

The optimal mop:geek ratio is maybe 6:1. At that ratio, the mops provide more energy than they consume. A ratio above about 10:1 becomes unworkable; it’s a recipe for burnout among supporting fanatics. Ideally, the ratio could be controlled. I think few subcultures understand this imperative, and I’m not sure how it could be done even if one did understand. Mops move in herds. Usually either there are only a few, or their numbers quickly grow too large.

Sociopaths only show up if there’s enough mops to exploit, so excluding (or limiting) mops is a strategy for excluding sociopaths. Some subcultures do understand this, and succeed with it.

Alternatively, you could recognize sociopaths and eject them. Geeks may be pretty good at the recognizing, but are lousy at the ejecting. Mops don’t recognize sociopaths, and anyway don’t care. Mops have little investment in the subculture, and can just walk away when sociopaths ruin it. By the time sociopaths show up, mops are numerically most of the subculture. Sociopaths manipulate the mops, and it’s hard for the geeks to overrule an overwhelming majority.

Anyway, horribly, geeks need sociopaths—if the New Thing is ever going to be more than a geeky hobby, or a brief fad that collapses under the weight of the mop invasion.

So what is to be done?

Be slightly evil

The subcultural mode mostly ended around 2000. There still are subcultures, new ones all the time, but they no longer have the cultural and social force they used to. The “classical model” of subcultures no longer works, for the reasons given here, plus others I’ll describe in upcoming writing. I don’t think it can be rescued.

However, the fluid mode—my hoped-for future—resembles the subcultural mode in many ways. The same social dynamics may play out, unless there is a powerful antidote.

A slogan of Rao’s may point the way: Be slightly evil. Or: geeks need to learn and use some of the sociopaths’ tricks. Then geeks can capture more of the value they create (and get better at ejecting true sociopaths).

Specific strategies for sociopathy are outside the scope of this book. However, I have an abstract suggestion.

Rao concludes his analysis by explaining that his “sociopaths” are actually nihilists, in much the same sense as I use the word. Serious subcultures are usually eternalistic: the New Thing is a source of meaning that gives everything in life purpose. Eternalistic naïveté makes subcultures much easier to exploit.

“Slightly evil” defense of a subculture requires realism: letting go of eternalist hope and faith in imaginary guarantees that the New Thing will triumph. Such realism is characteristic of nihilism. Nihilism has its own delusions, though. It is worth trying to create beautiful, useful New Things—and worth defending them against nihilism. A fully realistic worldview corrects both eternalistic and nihilistic errors.

Combining what works in eternalism and nihilism amounts to the complete stance—which is essentially the same thing as the “fluid mode.”

  • 1.

    Rao postulates three groups in any organization: the Clueless, the Losers, and the Sociopaths. The Clueless mistakenly believe that the organization is actually supposed to do whatever it pretends to be for: selling widgets, saving endangered herons, or educating school-children, for instance. They are dedicated to this mission and work hard, and creatively, to further it. The Losers have a job because they need a paycheck; their motivation is to make work reasonably pleasant in exchange for minimal effort. The Sociopaths recognize the reality that the organization is just the setting for a power game played among themselves. Nobody really cares about widgets, herons, or other people’s children. The Losers also understand this, but don’t have what it takes to play the game.

    In subcultures, Geeks are roughly parallel to the Clueless; they are passionate about whatever the subculture is supposedly about. Mops substitute for Losers: they show up for a reasonably pleasant time in exchange for minimal effort. Sociopaths are Sociopaths. The detailed dynamics are rather different, though; for instance, the Gervais Principle says that organizations begin with Sociopaths and end up with mostly Clueless, whereas subcultures begin with Geeks and end with mostly Mops.

  • 2. I’m using “geek” here to mean “someone fascinated by the details of a subject most people don’t care about.” There’s another sense of “geek,” meaning the sort of person you’d expect to find at a science fiction convention. There’s significant overlap, but in the first sense there are gardening geeks and golfing geeks, and most probably aren’t geeks in the second sense. They might create gardening subcultures, though.
  • 3. “MOP” is an abbreviation for “member of the public”; it seems to be fairly common in Britain. My American (mis-)use of it here is probably somewhat non-standard. Other terms that could be used are “casuals” or “tourists.”
  • 4. All the categories here—creators, fanatics, mops, sociopaths—are necessarily nebulous: ambiguous and changing over time. There is no “fact of the matter” about whether someone is an unusually enthusiastic mop, or a fanatic who is less committed than some other fanatics; nor whether someone who creates occasionally but mainly acts to support the subculture counts as a fanatic or creator. Anyone may shift roles, too.
  • 5. I am using “sociopath” here in Rao’s informal sense, not a technical, clinical one.
  • 6. I’ll discuss these barriers more extensively in upcoming writing.
  • 7. “Poseur” was perhaps directed even more at sociopaths than mops, but didn’t clearly distinguish between the two.

Atomization: the kaleidoscope of meaning

Gangnam Style! What’s it about?

(Who knows!)

Gangnam Style! What genre is it?

(Who cares!)

In our present, atomized mode of meaningness, cultures, societies, and selves cannot hold together. They shatter into tiny jagged shards. We shake the broken bits together, in senseless kaleidoscopic, hypnotic reconfigurations, with no context or coherence.

This may sound like a problem. Overall, my description of the atomized mode may sound like a panicked condemnation. However, there is much to like about atomization, and—I will suggest—it provides vital resources for constructing the next, fluid mode.

Atomized culture

The previous, subcultural mode failed because individual subcultures did not provide enough breadth or depth of meaning; and because cliquish subsocieties made it too difficult to access the narrow meaningness they hoarded.

The global internet exploded that. Everything is equally available everywhere—which is fabulous! Now, there are no boundaries, so bits of culture float free. Unfortunately, with no binding contexts, nothing makes sense. Meanings arrive as bite-sized morsels in a jumbled stream, like sushi flowing past on a conveyer belt, or brilliant shards of colored glass in a kaleidoscope.

With no urge for context to make culture understandable, everything is equally appealing everywhere. The atomized mode returns to the universalism of the countercultural mode—but by default, rather than design. In the 1960s, for the first time, everyone in an American generation listened to the same music, regardless of genre—as an expression of solidarity. Now, everyone in the world listens to the same music, regardless of genre, again—just because it’s trending on YouTube.

Gangnam Style has been watched 2.9 billion times on YouTube.1 Even counting repeat views, it’s probably well-known to most young people on the planet. Its genre is, in fact, K-pop; but may be the only K-pop song most Westerners have ever heard.

Genre—which defined many subcultures—has disintegrated. Atomization seemed at first like subculturalism taken to an extreme, but it is a qualitatively new mode. K-pop may be a subculture in Korea, but in America it’s just YouTube. It’s normal for a Top 40 hit to mash up country-style pedal steel guitar with bubble-gum-pop vocals, hip-hop rapping, EDM bass, and black metal blast beats. “Authenticity”—the aesthetic ideal of subculturalism—is impossible because there are no standards to be authentic to.

In atomized culture, intensity—shock, novelty, extremes—substitutes for structure. There are no systematic principles for comparing value, so immediate emotional appeal trumps formal qualities. The avant garde has finally expired as an irrelevant archaism. Duchamp couldn’t out-irreverence or out-peculiar Psy.

Atomized society

In atomization, the subcultural mode’s local communities cannot hold together, because they no longer deliver adequate meaning. The subcultural solution to the problems of self and society—intermediate-scale subsocieties that buffer individuals from national institutions—failed.

Instead, society moves onto global interactive media. Internet social networks support larger, geographically dispersed virtual communities. You no longer need to be in the happening place to get access to a genre or scene. You may not know the gender, race, or nationality of some of your closest friends. It is wonderful to find people who share your nearly-unique interests—but can online relationships replace in-person ones? Can electronic communities provide the same benefits as local ones?

The vestiges of systematic social organization are crumbling. As culture and society atomize, it becomes impossible to maintain a coherent ideology. Religions decohere into vague “spirituality,” and political isms give way to bizarre, transient, reality-impaired online movements. Decontextualized, contradictory, intensely-proclaimed religious and political “beliefs” displace legacy systems of meaning. These are not beliefs in an ordinary sense, but advertisements of personal qualities and tribal identification. The atomized mode generates paranoia, because without the systematic mode’s “therefores,” its structure of justification, there are no memetic defenses against bad ideas.

Atomized politics abandons the outdated convention that political arguments should make sense. Occupy, the Tea Party, ISIS, the “tumblr SJW” and “alt-right” social media movements, and the 2016 American Presidential campaign ignored “therefore” in favor of claims that were false and absurd, but not duplicitous, because they were not intended to be believed—just reacted to for their intense emotional impact.

Legacy systematic institutions—especially states—find themselves increasingly unable to cope with the rate of change, or to adapt to an environment of pervasive incoherence. This leaves cracking systems of government facing atomized populations, mutually uncomprehending because of their different modes of processing meaning, producing increasingly intense paranoia on both sides. States are starting to fail, as parts of the world become ungovernable. Others are abandoning democracy for authoritarianism, in desperate attempts to hold social structures together.

Atomized self

Woman looking through a kaleidoscope
Giant kaleidoscope image courtesy Bill Whittaker

We build selves by internalizing meanings from our culture and from social relationships. As culture and society atomize, we are bombarded with a kaleidoscopic chaos of brightly-colored atoms of meaning, and it becomes impossible to construct or maintain a coherent self.

The unity of self that was a reality in the choiceless mode, and a promised (but impossible) ideal in the systematic and countercultural modes, is a forgotten fairy tale. The subcultural mode reluctantly accepted personal fragmentation, but sought, anxiously, to manage it. The atomized mode is comfortable with a self that is a rushing jumbled stream, like the society and culture it internalizes.

A “stage 4” self is a system of principles and projects that structure all the details of one’s internal world, and that resolve priority conflicts among values, tasks, and relationships. This is impossible in the atomized mode.

The always-on internet delivers massively more interruptions, entertainments, relationships, and chores than humans evolved for. Even a relational, “stage 3” self is atomized into a turbulent stream of interaction, because relationships are electronically mediated.

“Authenticity” of self, like authenticity of culture, becomes meaningless when there is no “thine own” to be true to. When it’s obviously impossible to form a systematic self, the task is to surf your own incoherence. Increasingly, this is a practical problem, not an existential threat. We are gradually building skill at it—and this points toward the fluid mode, which accepts incoherence, but can also discover and build patterns within it.

Pathologies of atomization: the new problems of meaningness

In the countercultural mode, as mainstream meanings imploded, finding new foundations for meaning seemed the most urgent problem of meaning. We’ve long since abandoned that quest. The problems we face now are quite different. I will devote a full page to them later, and have mentioned some above.

Overall, the problem is that without structures and boundaries, shards of meaning do not relate to each other, so it’s impossible to compare them. There is no standard of value, so everything seems equally trivial—or equally earth-shaking, or equally threatening. Our lives are so full of so many tiny tasty things, and so many crises and outrages, that it may all fail to add up to much.

The loss of coherence, of “therefore,” gives a misimpression of nihilism, of meaninglessness. In the atomized mode, though, there’s overwhelming quantities of meaning. We suffer from FOMO,2 browser tab explosions, and Facebook trance. Projects, creativity, and fundamental values suffer when they are challenged by cacophonous internet alerts a million times a day.

Meanings no longer fit together to point anywhere. This resembles the choiceless (“traditional”) mode, which also feels no need for grand unified schemes that make everything make sense. In both modes, incoherence—the lack of large-scale structures of meaning—does not particularly seem a problem. We can navigate locally anyway.

The difference is that we now need to manage hugely more complexity, diversity, volume, and urgency of meanings. Individuals can get by in the atomized world without coherent understanding. Societies cannot.

Civilization still needs large systematic institutions—states, corporations, markets, universities—to survive. The atomized mode corrodes the social systems we depend on. Some are nearing collapse. I do not know whether people who grew up in that mode, and disdain systematicity, can keep the machinery of civilization running.

After the atomized mode

The atomized mode is actually impossible. No one is entirely incapable of understanding “therefore,” of coordinating meanings, or ranking values. As I explained at the beginning of this history of meaningness, all the modes are merely “ideal types”: simplified extremes that cannot exist in the real world.

In reality, we have always been in the fluid mode, because complete choicelessness is impossible; totally consistent systems are impossible; and absolute atomization is impossible. Eternalism and nihilism are impossible; we always know better. The fluid mode recognizes that structures of meaning are valuable but always nebulous; systems are powerful but always incomplete.

We have always been in the fluid mode, but now at last we are in a position to recognize it. Now, at last, we have the cultural, social, and psychological resources we need to get good at it. Atomization supplies the critical realization that perfect coherence is neither necessary nor even desirable. Fluidity builds on that, to re-form systems as relative tools rather than eternal absolutes.

  • 1. In late 2016, as I’m publishing this page, Gangnam Style might seem a quaintly old-fashioned choice for an example of atomized culture. Does anyone even remember it? I wrote the first draft of this page in early 2013, when Gangnam Style was everywhere. In 2016, it is temping to replace it with an up-to-date example. However, that would equally be ancient history in 2019. I hope people will still be reading Meaningness then. Short of rewriting the page every few weeks, it’s inevitable that any example of contemporary culture will be obsolete by the time you read it.
  • 2. Fear Of Missing Out.

Not a good decade for thinking

Sushi and sake
A fabulous decade for eating and drinking, though

The atomization of culture—its loss of logical or even aesthetic coherence—has made serious intellectual work much more difficult than it was twenty years ago. Significant new ideas are scarce. We understand that systems of meaning, which used to be the vehicle for thought, are no longer credible.

We are only beginning, tentatively, to develop alternative ways of thinking. These acknowledge both nebulosity (which undercuts conceptual systems) and pattern (which makes accurate thought possible).

I wrote the following in January, 2014, as a casual rant, and posted it in a private forum. It alluded to ideas about atomization that I only began publishing here in 2016. Now, in early 2017, those may seem obvious features of your Facebook feed—rather than recondite theories which I developed, haltingly, years ago. As I am still making slow progress in polishing text for publication: here is the rant.

Raw. Perhaps the style suits the subject...

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My girlfriend asked me over dinner: “So, where is the most exciting thinking happening now?”

That was a puzzler. After I stalled by saying “In my head, mostly,” and we traded various jokes about arrogance and narcissism, I had to admit that I couldn’t think of any. (We had both drunk rather a lot of sake, which is still affecting me, or I wouldn’t post something like this.)

“Maybe this isn’t a good time for thinking,” I said.

Which seemed accurate to her; but we agreed it was odd.

There are, of course, good and bad places and times for thinking. Athens in 450 BC was a famously good time. England in 700 CE was not.

The Manhattan Project was a good place and time to think—about atomic bombs, at least.

I was at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab through the 1980s. It was self-consciously similar to the Manhattan Project. Public expectations for AI were at an all-time high.1 We had unlimited funding from the Department of Defense. The lab selected ferociously smart students and staff. (In 1982, there were 2000 applicants for each available position as a graduate student.) Human-level computer intelligence was just around the corner.

Not.

That was a failed Manhattan Project. We had brilliant, fascinating, innovative theories, all of which were utterly wrong. It seemed like a fabulous place to think, but the intellectual culture was subtly broken, and we were all fooling ourselves.

Still, the 1980s overall were an exciting time. Molecular biology was taking off. My best friend was doing something important with molecular genetics at Harvard. (I can’t remember what.) I did a bunch of graduate-level coursework in that stuff, ’cuz it was so cool.

Also, the whole French post-structuralist thing was happening, which (like AI) was mostly flashy theories about nothing, but it felt like fireworks at the time.

So mostly that was a failure, but molecular biology was real. On the other hand… biology turned into “normal science” (i.e. routine crank-turning). Hard to be excited about it now.2

So what was the last exciting thing to happen in the world of ideas? Evopsych was exciting for about six months ten or fifteen years ago. But once you’d got your head around its few key ideas, the rest was obvious deductions. Verifying the details has become normal science again.

Some of us here are thirsty for “insight porn”… and there’s little to be had. Maybe it’s only sold under the counter and I’m too naive to find it. Or maybe I’m old and jaded; or my brain has rotted and I wouldn’t recognize an insight if it bit me in the hippocampus.

“So if you went back to MIT, would you find no interesting conversations there?” my girlfriend asked.

I don’t know—I haven’t hung around a university in twenty years. But I figure if anything was happening—other than normal science—I’d hear about it eventually. And I ain’t hearing nothin’.

So maybe you will humor me (since I’m drunk) and will allow, for the sake of the argument, that this is not a good decade for thinking.

Why not?

Well, I have a theory.

It’s a weak inference from a broader story about what is happening in our general global culture. I really truly intend to write that up properly Any Day Now.3

The theory starts from the fact that we are in the post-systems era. That isn’t my idea, it’s standard-issue 1980s French stuff—one of the few things they actually got right.

The problem is, mostly the only model we have for scarily smart people to express insights is to build conceptual systems. But those don’t work no more.

The not-really-all-that-smart people haven’t noticed that yet, and are still building systems, which is lame. (We can roll our eyes at anyone who comes up with a conceptual system. Nothing needs to actually be said, because that’s just so 20th century.)

So what do the scarily smart people do? They trade absurdly erudite jokes about nothing on twitter and complain about the scarcity of insight porn. (Not mentioning any names here. You know who you are.)

Then what?

Well, according to my theory (which looks distressingly like a conceptual system…) the next stage in cultural evolution is disposable assemblages. To quote myself:4

Finding or creating a consistent, coherent, universal culture, society, or self is NOT our task; that is the doomed dream of modernism.

Our new spiritual task is to devise diverse watercraft for sailing the turbulent seas of meaning. Not great -isms, but elegant windjammers.

Ships that sail the seas of meaning must be: collaborative; creative; improvised; intimate; disposable; beautiful; and spiritual.

Less poetically, meaningness-crafts are fluid, shared structures that organize meanings in ways that foreground whatever matters most.

This is what we are not yet good at. It’s a new requirement.

Until we learn how to build such craft, the present will remain… a lousy time for thinking.

  • 1. Since I wrote this, the late-eighties AI hype wave has been surpassed by a new late-twenty-teens AI hype wave.
  • 2. I wrote this shortly before I learned about CRISPR, which may end old age, sickness, and death. That could be quite interesting.
  • 3. Hold your breath! Definitely. Any day now.
  • 4. This was in a series of tweets in 2013.

Fluidity: a preview

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

This page (when written) will sketch a preview of the fluid mode. It will be only a preview, because most of Meaningness and Time will be about the fluid mode. This page specifically relates fluidity to its history: its evolution out of recent previous modes of meaningness.

One way of expressing fluidity is to say that cultural conditions are now right for understanding and acceptance of the complete stance. There is a widespread tacit understanding that social, cultural, and psychological systems do not “work,” and cannot “work,” if “work” involves any sort of guarantee. In other words, eternalism is unworkable. There is also widespread tacit understanding that nihilism is unworkable (and, in fact, silly). The atomized mode ideally dissolves all patterns, which is obviously impossible. So tacitly we all understand that meaning must be both nebulous and patterned—and this is exactly the complete stance. “The fluid mode” consists of working out what that may mean for society, culture, and self.

The fluid mode goes meta on the previous modes. That is, it understands meaning as a dynamic process of evolution through social, cultural, and psychological change. It recognizes all the problems that the previous modes tried to solve, synthesizes what was right in each attempt. It also abandons what was wrong in each.

The countercultures wrongly rejected rationality, because the systematic mode had absolutized it. The subcultures rejected universalism—rightly, but absolutely, which made nation-scale structures impossible. Atomization made coherence impossible, which could become disastrous. During the eras of these three modes, rational, large-scale, coherent systems became increasingly inconceivable—but without them, civilization is impossible.

The fluid mode must reinstate rationality, universality, and coherence, but with recognition of their nebulosity. In fluidity, systems are relativized, not eliminated.

The fluid mode follows the atomized one. Atomization’s great contribution is an instinctive appreciation of nebulosity. At an intuitive, kinesthetic level, we have all become much more comfortable with ambiguity, chaos, uncertainty, and volatility. What’s missing is an understanding of how pattern arises:

  • impermanently
  • creatively
  • biologically
  • collaboratively
  • spontaneously
  • in dependence on the non-human realm

Atomization bears new problems of meaningness: the overwhelming torrent of meaning spewed by the internet; its triviality, causing distraction from value judgements; and perceived tensions between internet and “real life.”

Atomization is a fact; it can’t be reversed. The question to ask is “how can we live enjoyably and effectively in a world in which society, culture, and self are atomized?” Part of the answer is: by constructing temporary assemblages of greater meaning—while recognizing that they can’t be answers or eternal or ultimate or universal or any of those obsolete absolutes.

Fluidity addresses atomization’s defects with watercraft that sail the sea of meanings. (This nautical metaphor will get quite complex, I’m afraid!) These ships must be collaborative, creative, improvised, intimate, transient, beautiful, playful, and spiritual.

Modes of meaningness, eternalism and nihilism

The diagram below summarizes the historical motions of modes of meaningness.

Time flows from top to bottom. The horizontal axis locates modes with respect to eternalism and nihilism—the denials of the nebulosity and patterns of meaningness.

Diagram showing the motion of modes of meaningness with respect to eternalism and nihilism, over time

The details of this chart should not be taken too seriously. In particular, relative horizontal motions are meant to be meaningful, but not their absolute positions. For instance, the fluid mode (“Waterworld”) should be less nihilistic than the atomized mode (“Kaleidoscope”), but trying to locate it relative to the subcultural mode probably makes no sense. I have, however, put the fluid mode exactly in the center, to indicate that it should avoid both eternalism and nihilism.

The black lines with crosses on them indicate opposition. In both cases, there’s influence as well as conflict. Philosophical nihilism did flow into the “late modern mainstream” of the 1950s, although that was denied. The dualist “Moral Majority” counterculture borrowed heavily from the monist “hippie” counterculture, although it mostly didn’t admit that. In fact, every mode of meaningness has taken pieces from every past and contemporary one. Creating meaning is hard, and great artists steal whenever they can.

The atomized kaleidoscopic mode is furthest over toward nihilism (not counting philosophical nihilism, which is mainly theoretical). However, full nihilism denies all meaning; whereas the problem in the atomized mode is more that there is too much meaning, than too little. It has just lost the coherence of pattern, and so becomes senseless and overwhelming.

Desiderata for any future mode of meaningness

Underwater fantasy

“Fluidity” is a positive vision for the future of society, culture, and our selves. Visions may be inspiring, but they’re useless unless they respect present realities. My conception of fluidity emerges from an analysis of the successes and failures of recent modes of meaningness.

This page, then, is the turning point of Meaningness and Time: from the recent past and present to the near future. It both looks back, extracting lessons from How meaning fell apart, and looks forward, sketching a nebulous preview of Sailing the seas of meaningness.

(If you have not read How meaning fell apart, it will help to read its overview, or to look at the summary chart. They explain how each mode attempted to solve problems of meaning the previous ones created, and how each was partly successful but eventually failed.)

The fluid mode should deliver the benefits of each previous mode, while minimizing the problems each created:

  • The choiceless mode’s sense of secure meaning in community, without its narrowness and material poverty
  • The systematic mode’s elegance, effectiveness, and enabling of nation-scale institutions, without its oppressive rigidity
  • The countercultures’ positivity, thickness and breadth, without their anti-rational idiocy
  • The subcultures’ diverse and creative subsocieties, without their parasitism
  • The atomized mode’s appreciation for nebulosity and provision of universal access, without its triviality

Is this possible? I think so—and the rest of Meaningness and Time sketches how.

Our tool for analyzing modes of meaningness, and for constructing the fluid mode, is the complete stance. That recognizes the inseparability of nebulosity and pattern, and thereby avoids the errors of both eternalism and nihilism. It particularly recognizes the nebulosity and pattern of boundaries and connections, and thereby avoids the errors of monism and dualism. These four confused stances account for most of the failures of the existing modes.

Metasystematicity is closely related to the complete stance. It is the attitude that systems of meaning are of great value (because meaning is patterned), but none can be complete or fully correct (because meaning is nebulous). Instead, we must deploy multiple systems, comprehend and negotiate the conflicts and synergies among them, and be willing to act even when no system can guide us.

Because systems emerge in particular social, cultural, and psychological circumstances, metasystematicity requires a historical perspective: an understanding of how meaningness develops through time. That was the aim of How meaning fell apart.

Here I ask: which aspects of these previous modes of meaningness are worth rescuing from historical oblivion, and how must they be transformed to function effectively as the future comes into focus?

Overview

We can understand the countercultural, subcultural, and atomized modes as attempts to address the defects of the systematic mode, and to restore lost benefits of choicelessness. They successively rejected three of systems’ key principles: rationality, universality, and coherence. These principles contribute to the oppressive rigidity of the systematic mode, because it takes them as eternalistic absolutes. Jettisoning them brought significant benefits. Unfortunately, each anti-systematic move was also, in part, regressive: walking back in longing for the choiceless mode.

Rationality, universality, and coherence contribute to systems’ beneficial functioning. Since the breakdown of the systematic mode, rational, large-scale, coherent systems have became increasingly inconceivable. Unfortunately, without them, civilization is impossible. A collapse of our legacy systems, under assault from anti-rational, anti-universal, anti-coherent myopia, would be catastrophic.

The fluid mode must restore all three principles, but in relativized forms that recognize their inseparable nebulosity and pattern. This requires a better understanding of the nature of meaningness—which I hope Meaningness, the book, supplies.

This page suggests that the fluid mode should:

  • Simulate choiceless community, providing social and cultural structures that allow us to live as if in a close-knit traditional tribe, but with the benefits of a postindustrial civilization.
  • Relativize systems, restoring respect for their aesthetic elegance and practical effectiveness, while dispelling their foundational certainties so they can accommodate alternatives.
  • Enjoy mass-culture creativity, as in the countercultures: appreciating their optimistic visions, their motivating drive, and their thickness and breadth of meaning.
  • Rework subsociety boundaries, so they provide diverse communities for diverse people, without parasitizing larger-scale cultural and social structures.
  • Embrace atomization, the technology-driven force that makes nebulosity inescapably obvious, and develop better cultural, social, and psychological tools for finding sense within it.

These are desiderata: mere hopes and wishes. Sailing the seas of meaningness explains how the fluid mode may work. It is not structured in terms of previous modes of meaningness—although it takes them as background. This page extracts principles from the history, so we will rarely require further reference to it.

Simulate choiceless community

Nearly all humans have had a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. We lived in wandering clans, of a dozen to a few score, which were parts of wider tribes of a few hundreds or thousands. Some anthropologists say we spent about four hours a day working, which was enough to meet all material needs. Everyone’s work was recognized as meaningful and valuable by everyone else. Most of the rest of the time was spent in enjoyable cultural and social activities. Band membership was elective (chosen): if you didn’t get along with one, you could usually join another.

This sounds like a good deal to me! It seems that such a highly-meaningful, socially supportive, leisure-filled life would feel right, because our brains evolved for it.

It is a utopian fantasy, though, unless we also admit the nasty, brutish, and short aspects of hunter-gatherer life. Not just the material poverty, but the social and cultural narrowness: like being stuck with your middle-school clique, listening to the same twenty dumb songs, for your entire life. Having choices is usually good. Personal development beyond communal values, into more sophisticated ways of being, is good for those who can manage it.

Can’t we have the benefits without the limitations? Especially, can’t we get the benefits of both the choiceless (traditional, communal, premodern) and systematic (bureaucratic, rational, modern) modes?

Cultures and societies may function well just to the extent that they manage that. We can’t go back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, even if we wanted to. But we can provide substitutes for its key features, or “simulations” that give similar benefits. In fact, every subsequent mode has worked partly by doing that:

The countercultural, subcultural, and atomized modes can all be seen as attempts to compromise between the choiceless and systematic modes, or to combine their benefits. Why is this so urgently necessary?

In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life, by the developmental psychologist Robert Kegan, suggests an answer. To make sense of life within systematic society, you have to build a systematic self. Otherwise, the expectations of modern institutions seem arbitrary, selfish, cruel, and deranged. Unfortunately, empirical studies find that only a minority of people in modern societies manage to create such selves. The majority are, in Kegan’s words, “developmentally traditional people in a modern world.” Friction from this mismatch causes great stress, especially in work life and in dealing with state institutions.

Society should work for as many people as possible. It certainly should work for the majority—who are not currently capable of coping with systematicity. That would mean they could live “as if” in the choiceless mode.

I hope the fluid mode will create a deliberately developmental society, based on a recognition that people vary in capacity. Ideally:

  • Societies and cultures should provide the feelings of belonging, security, and coherent, shared meanings we found in hunter-gatherer bands.
  • They should make material abundance available to all, with relatively little effort, with no requirement to conform to elaborate systematic demands.
  • There should be a clearly-marked path for personal development beyond the communal mode. It should encourage and reward those who pursue it—but not penalize or denigrate those who can’t, or choose not to.

This is a tall order. Fulfilling it completely is not feasible with our current material technology and economy, nor with available social and cultural “technologies.” However, that is not required for the initial transition to the fluid mode. It’s a longer-term goal. Each previous mode’s way of simulating choicelessness also depended on innovations in technology, economics, social organization, and culture, so this is nothing new.

Although progress is never guaranteed, virtually unlimited material abundance seems plausible in a few decades. That would enable new economic arrangements, such as a “guaranteed basic income,” for example. That would have social and cultural consequences that we can only speculate about—but which it would be good to start preparing for.

An immediate transition to abundance might result in a catastrophic crisis of meaning: what would everyone do all day? In the absence of close community and participatory culture, perhaps most people would spend their time watching TV, and experiencing the symptoms of nihilism—depression, rage, and anxiety—because life without imposed structure seems meaningless.

Relativize systems

The systematic mode asked: how can we do things better? And its answer was: by building knowledge up from rational foundations. That led to Renaissance art, the scientific revolution, constitutional democracy, internet cat videos, and most everything else that makes life better for us than for subsistence farmers.

Although rationalist epistemology worked astonishingly well for centuries, it is not actually correct. Nebulosity is unavoidable, and ultimate foundations are impossible. Attempts to force nebulous reality to fit rigid systems inevitably fail. And before failing, they result in alienation, anomie, totalitarianism, existentialism, and other such evils.

These problems led the three following modes to abandon the three epistemological principles of rationality, universality, and coherence. Accordingly, the countercultures proposed unrealistic reforms to soften systematicity; the subcultures carved parts of life away from the systematic matrix, but remained parasitic on it; and the atomized mode is simply oblivious to it.

Those developments were mainly steps backward, although the post-systematic modes were right that rationality had failed. Despite that, the systematic mode’s epistemology is more sophisticated than both those of the choiceless mode and those of the post-systematic modes. Rationality powers its elegance and effectiveness.

As with the choiceless mode, we should ask: How do we get the benefits of systematicity without the costs?

I will suggest this is possible, in the fluid mode, by adopting a meta-rational epistemology. Meta-rationality retains the virtues of systematic rationality, but also incorporates an understanding of nebulosity and pattern. Abandoning the futile quest for absolute foundations, it enables forms of flexibility the systematic mode lacked. It allows multiple interpenetrating systems to co-exist, without demanding that all apparent conflicts be resolved in favor of one or another. Meta-rationality treats rationality, universality, and coherence as often-valuable tools, not as cosmic absolutes.

Meta-rationality is cognitively challenging:

  • “Developmentally traditional people in the modern world” are not competent in systematic rationality. They cannot understand the question “how can we get the benefits of systematicity without the costs”—because they are blind to its beneficial operation. As far as they are concerned, safe drinking water, impartial courts, and cat videos might as well rain from heaven.
  • Those who have progressed to a systematic worldview, but no further, cannot believe the question has an answer, because they cannot imagine the possibility of anything better. The only alternatives appear to be a return to communal irrationality, or a nihilistic breakdown. This makes them willfully blind to systematicity’s costs.

Building a meta-systematic society and culture, when few people can follow meta-rational explanations, will be difficult. Nevertheless, I will suggest ways it may be possible. I will also suggest ways of making meta-rational understanding more broadly available. A clearly-marked path from personal systematicity to meta-systematicity is a further requirement for a deliberately developmental society.

In a sense, that is the project of Meaningness overall! But I will make more specific pedagogical proposals as well.

Enjoy the creativity and vision of mass culture

The systematic mode had an attractively optimistic vision: that we could do everything right, which would solve all problems. This vision was discredited by the endless catastrophes and breakdowns of the first half of the Twentieth Century.

The countercultures provided alternative optimistic visions. Those enabled a wave of delightful cultural creativity. Their universalism implied that “we, nationally or globally, are all in this together.” That gave them the critical mass of innovators needed to develop a panoply of new thick and wide meanings, attractive to tens or hundreds of millions of people.

Unfortunately, the universalism of the countercultures meant that their social reforms failed. People differ, and need different social, cultural, and personal arrangements. The fluid mode must recognize that. The countercultures’ anti-rationality also resulted in failure: their alternative, optimistic visions were wildly unrealistic.

Unlike the countercultures, the two subsequent modes have been unable to provide thick, broad, and positive culture. The essence of subculturalism was the rejection of mass-scale culture—which allowed creative diversity, but usually failed to achieve the scale needed to provide sufficient thickness and breadth of meaning. The atomized mode does resemble the countercultural mode in producing culture with global appeal, but its incoherence results in triviality, whereas the countercultures’ depth of meaning grew from coherent visions.

The subcultural and atomized modes also lost the countercultures’ optimism, and often slid into Lite Nihilism. As of 2017, most people in developed societies expect the future to be pretty much the same as the present, except worse. The possibility of a positive vision is met with derisive cynicism. This is understandable, as due to the collapse of eternalism, which had underwritten the belief in progress. But it is unfortunate and unprecedented.

How can we engender optimistic cultural creativity, like that of the countercultures—without their anti-rational idiocy, destructive antagonism, and totalitarian universalism?

In the fluid mode, this requires:

  1. Recovering a relativized rationality.
  2. Adopting the complete stance of participation, which resolves the opposition of monism and dualism. I explained how in “Completing the countercultures.”
  3. Recognizing the nebulosity and pattern of both universalism and particularism. I’ll sketch that in the next section of this page.

As for the first point: meta-rationality is the antidote to countercultural anti-rationality, as well as to systematic rationalist eternalism. Two partly-correct observations motivate anti-rationalism: that rationalism implies oppressive systematic rigidity, and that it implies nihilism.

  • By recognizing the nebulosity of meaningness, meta-rationality loosens up absolutist, rationalist systems.
  • By recognizing the patterning of meaningness, meta-rationality refutes and dispels nihilism.

Fluid social institutions and culture can grow from this understanding.

Rework subsociety boundaries

The subcultural mode abandoned universality, in favor of rigorous particularism. Different subcultures provided different bodies of meaning, suitable for different sorts of people. Finding the right subculture let you “be yourself.” Finding the right subsociety gave you a feeling of “coming home to my own people, at last.” This new mode provided a much better—nearly customized—self/society fit than the systematic and countercultural ones could.

Not needing to justify any universal claims, subcultures no longer had a use for any eternal rock of certainty. They maintained coherence thematically, with aesthetic judgements and with ritual, rather than with a foundational structure of justifications. This put them on track toward the complete stance: neither eternalist nor nihilist. Many subcultures did abandon eternalism—tacitly, at least—and most avoided nihilism.

Freed from pompous eternalism and dour nihilism, subcultures became explicitly play. Steampunk is deliberately ridiculous, and not meant to be taken seriously. But it is also not trivial genre entertainment, as it may appear to outsiders. The subcultures began to explore the possibility that seriousness and playfulness are not mutually exclusive. That inseparability should be a major, explicit aspect of the fluid mode.

Subculturalism enabled a new kind of creativity. Punks called it “DIY” (do it yourself): they rejected the resources of the culture industry, to escape its exploitative power. But “yourself” was an individualist self-misunderstanding. The tacit realization was that we make meaning together, as a subsociety, or “scene.” The meanings we make are meant just for us.

Functional communities range from dozens to thousands of people. When a subculture gained an audience of millions, the subsocieties that produced it exploded in size, became dysfunctional, and disintegrated.

Recognizing the problem, subsocieties found ways to limit membership. One strategy was to avoid mass appeal by making the subculture increasingly esoteric and repellent to outsiders. Eventually, the mode failed because the cultures it produced became ever narrower, shallower, and unsatisfying.

At their best, subsocieties and subcultures were refuges from the screeching chaotic dysfunction of nation-scale systematic social institutions and the nation-scale culture war. Particularism allowed members to deny responsibility for anything outside their subculture. Most did their best to simply ignore all that and enjoyed playing in their sandbox. This made the mode parasitic: keeping civilization running was someone else’s problem. Society as a whole cannot take this attitude. Meanwhile, nation-scale social institutions often regarded subcultures as threats, and attempted to destroy them, sometimes successfully. Nation-scale economic institutions often saw subcultures as opportunities for exploitation, which also destroyed some.

The failure of the countercultures showed that universalism, as an absolute, cannot work. However, the particularism of the subcultural mode also did not work as an absolute:

  • Rejecting mass culture as inherently rubbish was a mistake
  • We need effective nation-scale social institutions
  • The attitude that subsociety membership makes you special was psychologically harmful

The fluid mode must relativize both universalism and particularism:

  • Sameness and difference are not absolute; they shade into each other
  • Any two people, or two groups, are similar in some ways and dissimilar in others
  • Some principles apply almost universally; others make sense only for some people
  • Therefore, social institutions must address different issues at different scales
  • Because subsocieties are elective, many coexist in a single city. Organizing government structures geographically no longer maps social differences; we need an alternative

Supportive subsocieties were a great accomplishment of the subcultural era. I hope the fluid mode can create something similar. That will require explicitly reworking the relationship between subsocieties and larger groups. Both sides must understand and respect the needs of the other. Subsocieties must acknowledge their dependence on the effective functioning of states and economies, and must contribute to them. States and economies must acknowledge the worth of elective communities with distinctive values, and cede control over some matters to them.

This will not be easy. However, a proper understanding of the nature of boundaries may take us quite a long way. The boundaries between social groups are always both nebulous and patterned: selectively permeable. Boundaries exist only through constant maintenance activity: judgements of who and what is on one side or the other, who and what may pass, and the actions taken accordingly. Such judgements can never be fully systematized, but undergo continual renegotiation. And so boundaries naturally evolve as circumstances change.

This understanding illuminates the vertical relationship between subsocieties and larger institutions; the horizontal relationship between different subsocieties; and the relationship between individuals and subsocieties.

Embrace atomization

The atomization of culture, society, and self has liquefied experience. This mode contributes the critical realization that perfect coherence is neither necessary nor even desirable.

At a practical, intuitive, kinesthetic level, we have become much more tolerant of nebulosity: of paradox, volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Accepting nebulosity is a major step toward the complete stance, and toward the fluid mode.

Abandoning coherence altogether produces an overwhelming ocean of meanings that do not relate to each other in any way. That gives an impression of pervasive triviality. Value judgements—even aesthetic ones—seem impossible when nothing hangs together. Society cannot function without coherent relationships.

And yet… we do make value judgements, and society does still function. We have developed skills for navigating the seas of meaning. Mainly without explicit understanding, we constantly re-create relative coherence. We have learned to assemble atoms of meaning into temporary sea-worthy vessels, and to let go of those as they dissolve.

We are, in other words, already in the fluid mode. As we always have been.

Now we just need to get good at it.

Sailing the seas of meaningness

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

This page will introduce the fluid mode of society, culture, and self.

For a preview, see this page.

Fluid understanding: meta-rationality

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

Meta-rationality means using rational systems effectively without taking them as fixed and certain. It evaluates, selects, combines, modifies, discovers, and creates rational methods.

For a preview, see “What they don’t teach you at STEM school.”

In the cells of the eggplant

Eggplant in refrigerator

In the Cells of the Eggplant is an introduction to meta-rationality: ways of using rational systems more effectively by recognizing, working with, and transcending their limits.

Meta-rationality evaluates, selects, combines, modifies, discovers, and creates rational methods. It operates in the territory beyond the boundaries of fixed understanding.

The Eggplant is part of a gigantic hypertext book, Meaningness. Readers who dislike the web format have often asked for paper or ebook versions of Meaningness. Unfortunately, it is much too large for that, and also I’m unlikely ever to finish it. However, as I complete chunks the size of a normal book, creating paper or ebook versions is possible.

The Eggplant gradually builds a complex, densely connected conceptual structure. It is not actually well-suited to reading in pieces. So I will publish it first in paperback and as a Kindle ebook. I’ll create others only if enough people buy it to make me believe there’s genuine demand. Every page I write on the web gets many thousands of views; how many people will a traditional book reach?

Eventually I’ll chop the book into blog-post-sized bits and post it here on the web as well. I prefer reading on the web, myself! Maybe most people do! And it’s free! On the other hand, most people discover web pages via google searches or social media shares, and they are likely to land somewhere in the middle of the book. Most bits out of the middle won’t make much sense without having read what comes before.

To give some sense of the book—“Try before you buy”—I’m posting excerpts on the web before publication:

Because rationality matters

Eggplant in refrigerator

A. Is there any water in the refrigerator?
B. Yes.
A. Where? I don’t see it.
B. In the cells of the eggplant.

Was “there is water in the refrigerator” true?1

Rationalists may describe their faith as a quest to believe only true statements. Meta-rationalists may sneer. “Seriously? ‘Believing in truth’? How primitive,” we say.

But we don’t explain why, and it’s not obvious, so we’re being rude and unhelpful.

Believing true things matters. “HIV causes AIDS” is true, and figuring that out saved tens of millions of lives. Some politicians, religious leaders, and “alternative medicine” advocates said they “didn’t believe” HIV causes AIDS. On that basis, they blocked HIV prevention and treatment, causing millions of horrible, unnecessary deaths.

Irrationalists and anti-rationalists dismiss truth: either because true facts contradict their ideological agendas, or out of plain ignorance.

Open-minded rationalists may recognize that meta-rationalists come at truth from some other angle, and try to figure out what we could possibly be talking about. “Why would some smart people, seemingly without evil agendas, think it’s good to believe false things?” they wonder. “Maybe sometimes it’s pragmatically useful to believe false things—and therefore rational in a broader sense? How might that work?” And some rationalists develop interesting theories about that.

But this misses meta-rationalism’s point. It’s not useful to believe false things, for the same reason it’s not useful to believe true things. There aren’t any of either—not in the rationalist’s sense of true and false.

This may sound contradictory, or like an attack on an absurd straw man. Am I spinning facile paradoxes that will turn out to be meaningless word games?

I hope to persuade you otherwise: there are no contradictions here, and a clear understanding of “neither true or false in the rationalist’s sense” has great practical import.

“In what sense?” is a characteristically meta-rational question. “Yes, there is water: in the cells of the eggplant” is true in some sense—probably not a useful one. It’s false in another, more relevant sense.

The sense in which “HIV causes AIDS” is true is more complex, strange, mysterious, and interesting than you’d probably think. Later in this discussion, I’ll explain the relevant biology in detail—and I think you will be surprised! We will see that there are practical public health consequences to the unexpected sense in which “HIV causes AIDS” is true.

Meta-rationality matters

This exposition is long; technical in places; abstract and philosophical in others; and discusses less-than-pressing questions like “is the eggplant a fruit?” So you may wonder what the point is. Does “meta-rationality” matter, or is it meaningless ivory-tower philosophical wanking?

Meta-rationality matters because rationality matters. Rule of law, technology, and our post-subsistence economy are all products of rationality. They can’t survive without it. Rationality is under heavy bombardment from irrationalists, newly empowered by the internet, and civilizational collapse could result.

On the other hand, rationalism has conclusively failed in some respects. Enough smart people understand this that maintaining rational institutions by force is probably no longer feasible. Instead, meta-rationalism may deliver all the benefits of rationality, without rationalist errors. That might tip the balance of memetic power against irrationalists and save the world and stuff.

Here I hope to persuade you that wrong ideas about what “truth” and “belief” mean have large practical consequences, so getting a better understanding is important. I want to defend “truth” against irrationalists, but reject “truth” as misunderstood by rationalists.

What do “truth” and “belief” mean? These do sound like classic ivory-tower philosophical questions. Those are mostly nonsense and should be ignored. They are generally unanswerable; and having the “right” answers, if they existed, wouldn’t make any practical difference.

In practical terms, the meanings of “truth” and “belief” seem obvious enough. The sentence “HIV causes AIDS” is true because its meaning corresponds to reality: HIV does cause AIDS. Believing it means that you think the world is that way.

Meta-rationality concerns the relationship between rationality and the world. Rationalism has its own story about that, namely that rationality is the way to find beliefs (mental things) that are true (in the world). On careful investigation, this is empirically false. The world does not work in a way that could make any beliefs true in the sense that rationalism requires. The first main part of In the cells of the eggplant explains why not.

Important decisions, personal and political, often depend on knowing the truth of some matter. Rational methods are often the best way to find that. If rationality, pursued to its logical conclusion, endorsed the impossibility of truth or understanding, it would be really bad. But, whereas rationalism is mistaken, rational methods do often work. Meta-rationality is about how and why, and how to use rationality more effectively.

Recovering accurate, effective senses of “truth,” “belief,” and “rationality” requires a major re-thinking. The second half of The eggplant is about that.

The function and structure of the eggplant

Structure and function of the eggplant

[This page is part of the Introduction of the book In The Cells Of The Eggplant.]

A narrow introduction, not a broad overview

The Eggplant is a narrow introduction to meta-rationality, not a broad overview. An overview would cover most or all meta-rational topics briefly, on their own terms. I hope to write that someday.

The aim here instead is to lead gradually from rationality into meta-rationality via a single narrow path: what would “true belief” mean?

We are not going to look in detail at the main concern of meta-rationality, which is “How can I figure out what rational methods will be effective in this particular context?” And, we will also not address the main concerns of rationality, “What should I believe?” and “How should I make decisions?” These are all important, and meta-rationality has much to say about them, but the questions “what are truth and belief anyway?” are prior.

My hope is to lead the reader to a beachhead: a landing place within meta-rationality from which broader exploration becomes possible. My aim is to give some readers a partial understanding, and to inspire curiosity in others.

The discussion only points out some major landmarks along the path to meta-rationality. It’s not a detailed guide. For some readers, it may seem unhelpfully vague, and inadequately supported by argument or evidence. The aim, though is not to convince anyone of anything. Rather, to sketch a map that might inspire you to find your own way through the jungle between the major waypoints, or to go looking for more detailed maps elsewhere.

Ready to move beyond STEM rationalism?

The ability to think and act using formal rationality is precious, and far too rare. I worry that rational thought and action are waning, due to current cultural dysfunction. Promoting rationality, and defending it against irrationalism, is urgent and important.

People differ in cognitive style, personality, and preferences. Some master formal systems, use them effectively for years, but eventually begin to find them somewhat limited and limiting and dry. Others continue to enjoy working inside a formal system indefinitely. If that is you, you may not find this book to your liking. Nevertheless, I commend you: you are keeping the world running, for everyone else, in the face of mass idiocy, hysteric delusion, and tribal selfishness. Please continue!

The Eggplant is likely to be mainly useful to people who have already started to recognize the limitations of rational systems, and who are increasingly curious about how to go beyond them.

I wrote this particularly for people with a strong STEM background. (“Science, technology, engineering, and math.”) It uses mainly STEM examples, and occasionally gets quite technical. However, most of it can be understood without any particular STEM knowledge.

It does expect a strong background in some discipline of rationality—business management or law, for example, if not STEM. I could have written it in terms of the limitations of administrative rationality, using transformational business case studies; but STEM is my first love.

A book in two parts

Nautilus shell cut-away

The Eggplant has two main parts: one on rationalism, and the other on meta-rationalism.

The first part works through a series of increasingly sophisticated rational models that try to explain what “believing true things” would mean. Each has a fatal flaw. Each can be patched, producing a more complex model, which also fails. Eventually it becomes plausible that no similar model can work. That suggests we need some quite different story.

The second part of the book presents the meta-rational alternative: a different account of how rationality works and how best to use it.

The book is long enough, and difficult enough, that it needs an exponential spiral organization—like the shell of a nautilus—with repeated summaries and expansions. So here is a more detailed overview…

Introducing an introduction

Before the first part of the book, there’s an introduction. It includes the outline you are reading now, and then two bits that clarify terms.

The first bit distinguishes reasonableness, rationality, and rationalism. There is an everyday usage in which “rational” means just “not stupid or crazy.” To avoid confusion, I call this “reasonableness.” Then there are many types of formal rationality, such as those found in science, mathematics, and law. These rational systems should be distinguished from “rationalism,” a body of mistaken claims about how and when and why rationality works.

The second bit introduces “ontological nebulosity”: the inherent indefiniteness of reality. Rejection of nebulosity is the root reason all rationalist theories have failed. Meta-rationality accepts nebulosity, and works with it effectively. Meta-rationalism is an explanation of how and when and why reasonableness, formal rationality, and meta-rationality work.

Taking rationalism seriously

Nowadays, rationalism often operates as a mere eternalistic belief system—an unfounded certainty based on imaginary understanding. Historically, though, rationalism was a serious intellectual project: to justify rationality by applying it to itself. The goal was a well-defined, detailed, rational explanation of what rationality is and why it works. Initially, there was no obvious reason this should not have succeeded.

The first half of The Eggplant works through a series of attempts, and shows how each failed. The aim is not to refute these theories in detail—because it is uncontroversial that each did fail. Rather, we will examine each failure mode in enough detail to diagnose the problem. By comparing these individual diagnoses, a pattern emerges: the overall reason rationalism can’t work.

On our “narrow path,” we look only at the question: “What it would mean to believe a true fact?”

  • What sort of a thing would a belief have to be?
  • How would the world have to be in order for beliefs to be true or false?
  • What would the inside of your head look like if you had beliefs?

Each rationalist model fails to explain truth and belief for particular reasons. Each of these failures can be understood rationally, and so we can apply a patch to explain each class of anomalies, yielding a more complex and sophisticated model. (A “patch” is extra stuff added to software to fix a problem.)

Eventually, rationalism comes to look epicyclic: a hairy, buggy kludge of legacy machinery that still can’t explain key observations. At that point, one may simply hope someone can somehow make it work someday. However, analysis of its failure modes, followed by fundamental re-thinking, leads naturally to the quite different, meta-rational alternative.

The sequence of models roughly recapitulates the development of rationalist thought over the twentieth century. Particularly, it could be taken as a rough history of logical positivism, which was the last serious rationalist movement.

However, the goal here is not historical detail or accuracy, but understanding the intrinsic reasons each patch becomes necessary—as the failure modes of successive models come into view.

The final diagnosis is that every rationalist account gets wrecked, in stormy seas of counterexamples, on the black reef of ontological nebulosity.

If that already seems obvious to you, you could skip over the first half of the book, to go on to read about the meta-rational alternative.

Ontological remodeling

Our diagnosis was that rationalism assumes a fixed ontology, which collides with the reality of ontological nebulosity. Meta-rationality takes ontologies as malleable. Ontological remodeling—reworking categories, properties, and relationships—is a key meta-rational operation.

Meta-rationalism remodels the rationalist ontology of truth, belief, and rationality. So, to understand what sort of thing meta-rationalism is (a remodeling), we need first to understand what meta-rationality does (remodel).

That is quite a complex and difficult subject. The first chapter of part 2 gives an intuitive introduction, relying heavily on specific examples from the history of science. It ends with an extensive discussion of the successive ontological remodelings of the category “planet.”

Taking reasonableness seriously

Meta-rationalism’s explanation for how and when and why rationality works rests on an understanding of how and when and why mere reasonableness works.

Informal reasoning is adequate for most everyday tasks, and it it does not assume a fixed ontology. It usually deals with nebulosity effectively. How?

To find out, we need to take reasonableness seriously. We should not dismiss it—as rationalism often does—as irrelevant because it is irrational, or imagine that it is a crude, weak-sauce approximation to true rationality. It addresses issues formal rationality can’t and doesn’t.

We need to investigate reasonableness as an empirical phenomenon. I will review some major features and dynamics of reasonable activity that have been discovered through rigorous observation.

In summary, reasonableness works because it is context-dependent, purpose-laden, interactive, and tacit. The ways it uses language are effective for exactly the reason rationality considers ordinary language defective: nebulosity.

Remodeling rationality

Formal rationality aims for the opposite qualities: context-independence, purpose-independence, detachment, and explicitness. In some cases, it gains huge leverage by translating a problem from its nebulous real-world specifics into an abstract, formal realm, with a fixed ontology. It solves the problem in that domain, and re-applies the formal solution to the real-world situation.

Formal rationality depends on reasonableness for two reasons.

First, it relies on reasonableness to translate between the nebulous real world and a clear-cut formal abstraction of it. In the simplest cases—sometimes encountered in real-world application of physics theories—that is a matter of simple approximation. The formalism applies directly, to within a fixed margin of error. In most cases, however, it is a much more complex, and nebulous, matter of interpretation and negotiation. These are non-rational, but reasonable, cognitive activities.

Second, perfect context-independence, purpose-independence, detachment, and explicitness can never be achieved—in principle, never mind in practice. Formal models cannot entirely meet these standards for “rationality,” even setting aside the interpretation issues and computational limitations. Rationality is, therefore, much more similar to “mere reasonableness” than rationalist ideology supposes. Further, in practice, formal reasoning is almost always intertwined with informal cognition.

After meta-rational remodeling, “truth” and “belief” appear as jumbles of disparate, nebulous phenomena, sharing only a vague family resemblance—but nevertheless important. This is why meta-rationalism isn’t “sometimes it’s good to believe false things,” or “intuition trumps logic,” or “truth is just a social construction,” or “whatever you take it be,” or any of those other anti-rational clichés.

Rationality, on the meta-rational view, is not the optimal method for discovering truths. It is a jumble of disparate methods of understanding, which work more or less well in different sorts of situations. That makes it no less valuable. And, taking this more realistic view of how and when and why rational methods work can help us apply them more effectively.

Taking meta-rationality seriously

Meta-rationality is reasoning about which rational methods to use, and how, in a specific situation. That can include remodeling systems by understanding how they relate to contexts and purposes.

Effective meta-rationality depends on meta-rationalism: an accurate understanding of how and when and why rational methods work.

The Eggplant is not a manual of meta-rationality. The last part of the book aims more to explain what meta-rationality is, and ways it manifests, than to show you how to do it.

Nevertheless, it does explain some common meta-rational operations, and points out patterns in how they go. I plan to discuss this in more detail in follow-on work. However, I hope even the sketch here may have some practical use.

Does any of this matter?

STEM seems not to work as well as it used to. Hugely more research and development effort yields fewer breakthrough discoveries and fewer significant new products. New ideas seem increasingly hard to find. Many sciences now face a “replication crisis”: most supposed knowledge in these fields turns out to have been false. Eroom’s Law shows that it keeps taking exponentially more R&D to generate new pharmaceuticals. Part of problem is doing rationality badly: failing to preregister experiment designs, or using lousy software development methods, for instance. I don’t think that’s the main thing.

Too much R&D is mechanical by-the-book crank-turning, within a fixed framework, without reflection on whether it makes any sense in context. STEM can be “bad” not because it’s wrong, but because it’s trivial or irrelevant. Only a meta-rational view can help with that.

For individuals in STEM fields, meta-rationality becomes particularly important as one moves from being a technical contributor into management roles. Done well, management is an inherently meta-rational activity: it is about selecting, modifying, and creating systems, in the face of nebulosity. Entrepreneurship is even more obviously meta-rational: you create a company out of nothing, with no rules to guide you, only a nebulous understanding of a business opportunity.

Taking a still broader view:

Our societies, cultures, and selves also seem not to work as well as they used to. In How Meaning Fell Apart, I explained why. In short, the modern world was built on a foundation of rationalism. When rationalism failed, modernity ended. We live now in “postmodernity,” resulting from abandoning rationality, universality, and coherence. Postmodernity is characterized by nihilistic malaise, atomization, and political dysfunction. It could result in a civilization-ending catastrophe.

In Sailing the Seas of Meaningness, I suggest that recovering rationality is an urgent antidote. However, attempting to reinstate modernity by force, on a foundation of rationalism, is infeasible (even if it were desirable). The failures of modernist rationalism are too obvious.

Meta-rationalism is an alternative, more accurate explanation for the value of rationality. I believe we can and should and will remodel society, culture, and ourselves on a meta-rational basis. That will deliver the benefits of rational modernity without its harms and errors.

Introducing key terms

Cirrus clouds

Exactly how many clouds are in this photograph?
Image courtesy Dimitry B

This section explains how The Eggplant uses these words: nebulosity; ontology and epistemology; rationality, rationalism and anti-rationalism; reasonableness and irrationality; meta-rationality and meta-rationalism.

It also sketches the ways these concepts relate to each other. That gives, in effect, another introductory summary of some major themes of the book.

Nebulosity

Literally, nebulosity means “cloud-like-ness”:

  • Boundaries: Clouds do not have sharp edges; they thin out gradually at the margin. As you approach a cloud (in an aircraft, or on a mountain hike), you cannot say quite when you have entered it.
  • Identity: It may be impossible to say where one cloud ends and another begins; whether two bits of cloud are part of the same whole or not; or to count the number of clouds in a section of the sky.
  • Categories: Cirrocumulus shades into cirrus and into altocumulus; clouds of intermediate form cannot meaningfully be assigned to one or another.
  • Properties: Depending on temperature and density, clouds may be white, gray, blue, or irridescent. There are no specific dividing lines between these colors. Clouds have diverse, highly structured shapes, which cannot be precisely described. First, because the edges are vague; and second because the shape is so complex that a full description would be overwhelmingly gigantic even were it possible. Yet meteorologists find useful phrases like “ragged sheets,” “wavy filaments,” “bubbling protuberances,” or “castle-like turrets.”

Clouds are an extreme case, but nebulosity is pervasive. Other than in mathematics and fundamental physics, nothing is ever definitely this-or-that. Everything is always somewhat this and somewhat that. Put under high enough magnification, a stainless steel ball exhibits the same indefiniteness as a cloud. No ball can be perfectly round, nor made of perfectly pure steel, nor can one definitely say that some particular atoms are part of it or part of its surrounds.

For this reason, there are few if any absolute truths about the eggplant-sized world. Mostly, the best we can ever get is “true for all practical purposes.” And most of the truths we use, even in the hard sciences, are “pretty much true” or “true as far as a particular use goes.” This raises occasional problems for rationality in practice, and causes serious difficulties for rationalism as a theory. Meta-rationalism addresses these issues effectively.

Because of nebulosity, definitions can’t be perfectly precise. Some categories hang together only by “family resemblance”: there is no single common feature, it’s just that this is similar to that, which is similar to another thing.1

However, it’s often useful to sharpen categories somewhat, and to disambiguate word meanings to some extent. Several of the key terms in The Eggplant—especially “rationality”—have previously been used in multiple ways, and clarity requires pointing out which I intend. The definitions in this section will still be somewhat vague. Meanings will come into better focus gradually, through understanding words’ use in later discussions.

“Nebulosity” is itself, necessarily, a nebulous concept, which cannot be precisely defined. However, since it is so central to The Eggplant, I’ll explain it in more detail in a whole section after this one.

Ontological and epistemological

The Eggplant isn’t a philosophy book, so it uses “ontological” as engineers do.2 Ontology is about how the world is. The ontological questions are: “What things, of what sorts, are there? What properties and relationships do they have?” By an ontology, engineers mean a set of answers, usually relative only to a specific domain.

Rather than advocating a particular ontology, I will reply, over and over again, in different ways: “These questions have no definite answers, due to nebulosity.” Meta-rationality is concerned mainly with ontological questions, and gives nebulous—but useful—answers. ƒ Epistemology is about what we know of the world. The epistemological questions are: “What is knowledge? What is a belief? How can we get true beliefs and eliminate false ones?” Rationality is mainly concerned with these epistemological issues; it generally ignores ontological ones.

We can’t fully separate epistemology and ontology. The first part of this book shows how rationalism tries to do that, and so goes wrong. How things are partially determines how you can know them. Nebulosity is pervasive, so little could be known definitely, even if we had unlimited access to reality. Most facts about clouds and eggplants are not absolutely true, only true-enough, and so they cannot accurately be believed absolutely. Meta-rational epistemology takes this nebulosity of truth, knowledge, and belief into account.

Rationality

Meanings of “rational” have evolved and proliferated over centuries. These share only a family resemblance, so no precise definition is possible. Various schools of thought have refined and promoted particular versions. Part I of The Eggplant explores some specifically.

I will treat rationality as a practical activity, things we actually do, rather than as a metaphysical ideal we should aspire to. Generally, rational methods are formal, systematic, explicit, technical, abstract, atypical, non-obvious ways of thinking and acting, which have some distinctive virtue relative to informal ones.3

“Systematic” and “formal” are key criteria, but both are nebulous. They are a matter of degree. Mathematical logic is extremely formal; a chemistry methods manual is quite formal; a corporate personnel policy is somewhat formal; a “Do Today” task checklist is only barely formal.

Rationality works mainly with general knowledge. Ideally, it aims for universal truths. Generally, knowledge of a specific object does not count as “rational” unless it applies to every other object in some class. The glory of Newton’s theory of gravity is that it is true uniformly everywhere in the universe, equally for an apple and an asteroid.4 In fact, we’ll see that formal systems cannot deal with particular physical objects at all—one reason rationality is inadequate by itself.

Reasonableness and irrationality

In everyday usage, “rational” has an informal meaning of “thinking and acting in ways that make sense and are likely to work.” In this sense, “rational” is synonymous with “sensible.” It means “not stupid, crazy, or meaningless.” Somewhat arbitrarily, I will call this reasonableness, and reserve “rationality” for systematic methods.5

Much of The Eggplant is about the relationship between these two. Understanding that is a prerequsite for meta-rationality. Rationalism misunderstands reasonableness as a primitive approximation to rationality. In fact, it has somewhat different—though overlapping—functions. “Mere” reasonableness addresses the nebulosity of the everyday world effectively, which formal rationality can’t. Meta-rationality combines resources from reasonableness and rationality, plus ones of its own, to understand and act effectively in circumstances the others cannot manage.

I’ll use irrational to mean failure to think well or act effectively when you should. It means “unreasonable” or “nonsensical,” or “stupid” or “crazy,” in the non-clinical sense of those words.

By this definition, irrationality is contrary to all three of reasonableness, rationality, and meta-rationality. I will not use it to mean “not systematically rational.”

Rationalism and anti-rationalism

I will use rationalism to mean any belief system extolling broad claims about value of rationality, going beyond the evidence of common experience. In the plural, rationalisms are diverse belief systems of this sort.

The most influential rationalisms attempt universality across domains: they are meant to apply in all situations and task types. Others are more specific: particular notions of rationality that apply only in mathematics, science, law, management, or accounting. The Eggplant considers mainly universal rationalisms, or ones meant to apply broadly in technical fields.

Typically, rationalisms attempt to form rational theories of rationality. That is, they seek systematic, explicit, technical, abstract, non-obvious explanations for how and why rationality works. Ideally, they aim for definite proof of rationality’s universal efficacy.

Typically, rationalisms specify some ultimate criterion according to which thinking or acting could be judged to be correct or optimal. Typically, they say that thinking in accordance with the criterion reliably produces true beliefs. They may also claim rationality yields maximally effective action.

For rationalism, ideal rationality means conforming to the criterion. Rationalism is normative: everyone ought to think and act that way, as nearly as possible.

Under this definition, “rationalism” must go beyond “formal methods are often useful, hooray!” That is the common experience: for anyone who uses such methods, their value is obvious.6 I will use rationalist to mean someone who promotes rationalism—rather than someone who just finds methods of systematic rationality often useful in practice.

Let’s consider a variety of claims about rationality, roughly from weaker to stronger:

  1. It is better to be rational than irrational
  2. Systematic rationality often works, so you should use it when appropriate
  3. Rationality (whose definition is left vague) is always good
  4. Rationality is all there is to thinking and acting well; it is sufficient for all purposes, and there’s nothing else you need
  5. Rationality is defined by such-and-such a criterion; you should conform to it as nearly as you can
  6. Certain specified methods meet the rationality criterion, so you should use them whenever you can
  7. There’s a single master method of rationality, which guarantees an optimal result

I think claims 1 and 2 are correct. I will not count them as “rationalism.” Not everyone agrees with them, though. Let’s say anti-rationalism is any worked-out denial of either 1 or 2. Meta-rationalism is not anti-rationalism, since it affirms both. “Rationalism” might be defined as holding claim 4 or above. Meta-rationalism denies 4-7, so it is not rationalism.

Claim 3 is a diffuse attitude of alignment. If rationality means just “thinking and acting well,” then it is correct by definition. Also, claim 3 is importantly right if it’s just a rejection of anti-rationalism. On the other hand, a diffuse, incoherent rationalist faith is imparted implicitly in the STEM curriculum. There must be a correct way to think, some rationalists suggest, but we don’t know quite what it is; or they extol a vague principle like “the scientific method.” No one has been able to give a detailed, empirically adequate explanation of what “the scientific method” is, so advocating it is nearly vacuous.

I think the stronger claims 4-7 are mistaken. Formal rationality is rarely if ever sufficient on its own in real-world situations; there’s no fixed criterion for rationality; nothing can be guaranteed by or about rationality in practice; and there is no method that is always rational to use.

Distinguishing weaker and stronger claims about rationality may help correct both rationalist and anti-rationalist errors. I suspect many anti-rationalists react to overstated rationalist claims, rightly rejecting them, but then mistakenly go on to deny that systematic rationality is often valuable. I suspect many rationalists rightly wish to defend rationality’s genuine value, but mistakenly go on to affirm implausibly strong claims as well. Rationality does have “distinctive virtues” (which we’ll return to in Part III); but these are nebulous and cannot be guaranteed.

Rationalism is based on a fantasy of how we would like knowledge, action, and reality to work. It would be highly convenient if they did. In a world without nebulosity, in which objects and properties were perfectly crisp, rationality would be fully adequate. But we do not live in such a world. To the extent that rationality does work, it is largely because we have engineered our world to make it behave more nearly that way.

Non-rational, reasonable judgement is unreliable, sometimes uncomfortable, and leads to conflict when people get different answers. When they get stubborn about that, or when misjudgment leads to disaster, it’s easy to regard all “reasonableness” as simply irrational. The hope of rationalism is that some mechanical criterion or procedure could provide certainty, understanding, and control by eliminating non-rational factors. This is not possible, because rationality by itself can’t deal with the nebulous eggplant-sized world at all. Abstract, formal reasoning cannot reach into that realm; it requires reasonable activity as a bridge.

The problem with rationalism is not that it is false as an abstract philosophical theory. (Who cares?) The problem is that it is misleading in practice. It encourages you to overlook nebulosity, and the bridging function of reasonableness it demands; so you end up using rationality wrongly. This is not a minor or theoretical danger. The replication crisis has revealed that most supposed knowledge in many scientific fields, derived through misuse of rational methods, is false.

Part I of The Eggplant explains a series of specific technical difficulties rationalism encounters. Each failure mode has the same underlying cause: denial of nebulosity.7

Meta-rationality and meta-rationalism

Meta-rationality means figuring out how to apply rationality in a specific situation, and skill in doing so. It is a word I made up, to cover disparate insights about the use of rationality gathered from many fields. A few people have used the term “meta-rationality” with similar meanings before, in passing, but I don’t know of any previous detailed account.

Rationality and meta-rationality are complementary activities. Meta-rationality is not an alternative to rationality. Neither can operate without the other; they walk hand-in-hand.

Meta-rationality is not in the business of finding true beliefs or optimal actions. That’s rationality’s job. On the other hand, getting good at meta-rationality will make you more effective at rationality, and therefore better at finding true beliefs and optimal actions.

Meta-rationality selects and adapts rational methods to circumstances, so it is meaningless without rationality. Conversely, you cannot apply rationality without making meta-rational choices. However, since meta-rationality is rarely taught explicitly, it’s common to use only the simplest, default meta-rational criteria. Those are meta-rational nonetheless: there is no universal rational method, so in any situation you have to choose one and figure out how to apply it.

Meta-rationality is not the application of formal rationality to itself (as one might suppose from its name).8 Applying rationality to itself is a rationalist program. We’ll see that, because of nebulosity, reasoning about how to apply rationality cannot be formally rational. (But it should not be irrational or anti-rational either!)

Meta-rationalism is an understanding of how and when and why reasonableness, rationality, and meta-rationality work. Whereas rationality and meta-rationality are different sorts of things, rationalism and meta-rationalism are the same sort of thing: accounts of effective thought and action. Meta-rationalism finds rationalism an inadequate account, and offers a complete replacement.9 So, perhaps confusingly, while rationality and meta-rationality are complementary activities, rationalism and meta-rationalism are incompatible theories.

Once you recognize that denial of nebulosity is the deep structure underlying each of the difficulties rationalism encounters, the solution approach is obvious: accept nebulosity from the beginning, and work with it, instead of trying to ignore or eliminate it. As a practice, meta-rationality does just that. As a theory, meta-rationalism is a more accurate account of the sort of world we live in; and so it gives better advice than rationalism in cases in which nebulosity matters.

Meta-systematicity is a broader category that includes meta-rationality. It is reflection on how systems, not necessarily formally rational ones, relate to their circumstances. One may take a meta-systematic approach to psychological, social, and cultural systems. These possibilities are explored elsewhere in Meaningness, the work of which The Eggplant is a part.10

  • 1. The understanding of categories in terms of “family resemblance” originates with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.
  • 2. Some of the questions I describe as “ontological” might rather be called “metaphysical” by philosophers. The distinction between ontology and metaphysics is nebulous, however. I’m mostly avoiding “metaphysics” because for many people it means “holistic chakra-balancing aromatherapy.” On the other hand, ontology, as a branch of academic philosophy, examines many issues that are out of this book’s scope.
  • 3. Some non-rational systematic religions and philosophies would also meet these criteria. There is a “demarcation problem” here. The usual meaning of “the demarcation problem” is to find criteria that clearly distinguish science from non-science. This seems to be impossible. Different sciences seem to bear only a family resemblance to each other, with no single feature in common. However, the demarcation problems for both science and rationality are rarely an issue in practice. We know science and rationality when we see them, and can usually make a cogent argument for why a particular method or system is scientific or rational or not, even if there is no general rule.
  • 4. This applies to semi-formal rational systems as well. A company policy that said “employees must turn in their weekly timesheets by the following Thursday, except Bertrand” would not count as rational. In a rational policy, if Bertrand is an exception, it must be as an instance of a class. For example, if Bertrand is an exception because he’s on a secret solo dogsled expedition to the South Pole, a rational policy would be “employees must turn in their timesheets by the following Thursday, unless they are out of internet range, in which case they must turn it in by the Thursday following their return to civilization.”
  • 5. Although the concept is familiar to everyone, there seems to be no standard word for what I’m calling “reasonableness.” That is probably because it is usually viewed as a half-baked approximation to rationality, and therefore can be ignored. As we will see, this is inaccurate.
  • 6. In “Ignorant, irrelevant, and inscrutable,” I discuss the irrationalists who simply don’t understand that formal methods are often useful, and the anti-rationalists who oppose systematic rationality for aesthetic, political, religious, or “spiritual” reasons. Since the European Enlightenment, anti-rationalism has mainly been suppressed in favor of a consensus in favor of rationality among the powerful. There are ominous signs that this consensus may now be failing. See “A bridge to meta-rationality vs. civilizational collapse.”
  • 7. In the language of Meaningness, this is a form of eternalism. Equivalently, it is the fixation of patterns as ontological absolutes. I mostly don’t use these terms in The Eggplant.
  • 8. To avoid this possible confusion, a better term might be “circumrationality.” It’s about the circumstances that surround the application of rationality. That sounds cumbrous, though. I don’t much like any of the alternative terms I’ve considered.
  • 9. Logically, there could be multiple meta-rationalisms: different theories about the relationships among reasonableness, rationality, and meta-rationality. Currently, there is not even one fully worked-out version, so meta-rationalisms in the plural are only hypothetical.
  • 10. Meta-rationality and meta-rationalism are both also types of metacognition, another related term used mainly in education theory. It means knowledge of, and skill in using, one’s own cognitive capacities. It’s a much broader category, not focussed on formal rationality, and I won’t refer to it again in this book.

Ontological remodeling

High-resolution MVIC image of Pluto in enhanced color to bring out differences in surface composition.
Object #134340

We have arrived at the midpoint of In the cells of the eggplant. In its first part, we saw how every attempt to make rationalism work failed, in each case because it denied ontological nebulosity. The second part explains how meta-rationality works with ontological nebulosity to resolve the problems rationalism encountered.

Formal rationality usually works within a fixed ontology, unquestioned and often implicit. That works well so long as the ontology is good enough for the job at hand. When it isn’t, total breakdown can result, because rationality has no way of repairing the breach.

Meta-rationality stands outside any particular ontology. It treats ontologies as malleable, and manipulates them explicitly. It evaluates, selects, combines, modifies, discovers, and creates alternative ones.

Ontological remodeling—the reconfiguration of individuation criteria, categories, properties, and relationships—is a relatively advanced meta-rational activity. Ideally, we would build up extensive conceptual prerequisites before discussing it. The topic might be best left to the end of The eggplant—or, in fact, to some other text.1

Except that we need this idea to explain what sort of thing meta-rationality is. Namely, meta-rationality is itself an ontological remodeling of rationality.

This coincidence is potentially confusing. We need to recognize ontological remodeling at two levels:

  1. At the meta level, moving from rationalism to meta-rationality requires remodeling the fundamental ontological categories of rationality, such as truth, belief, deduction, induction, and so on.
  2. At the object level, ontological remodeling is a major aspect of the subject matter of meta-rationality.

So the shift from the rationalist to meta-rational view is an instance of the thing meta-rationalism describes. This is unfortunate, because it implies that meta-rationality is required in order to understand meta-rationality. Formal rationality doesn’t include an account of ontological remodeling, which is the skill needed to see the possibility of an alternative view. So meta-rationalism is a prerequisite for itself, which is part of what makes the shift difficult.

As always when something is a prerequisite for itself, you have to proceed in a spiral. An approximate understanding of a small part of the subject makes it possible to grasp more of it, and thereby to revise your understanding of the initial beachhead. You need repeated passes over the topic, in increasing breadth and depth, to master it.

So this “middle bit” of The Eggplant provides a rough, informal, partial account of ontological remodeling—enough to help the second major part make sense.

To make it concrete, I use examples taken from the history of science. I find them interesting for their own sake, and I hope you too find them enjoyable as well as enlightening.

The extinction and survival of categories

Often remodeling begins by recognizing that a category isn’t a well-defined grouping for which there can be a meaningful, unified story.

During ontological remodeling, a category may:

  1. Disappear completely
  2. Convert from formal to informal status
  3. Get a new formal meaning

A category disappears when it turns out there’s nothing in it—the entities it grouped don’t exist—or when it groups entities that have nothing meaningfully in common. In scientific history, categories like phlogiston, the luminiferous aether, and the Philosopher’s Stone turned out to have nothing in them, and got dropped. The taxon “Bestiae,” the Great Chain of Being, and the Hippocratic humors turned out to group genuine entities in useless ways, and so were also dropped.

The second possible outcome is that a category turns out to be too stubbornly nebulous for any formal account of it to work. Then it may hang on informally. It is no longer “officially” part of the new ontology, but people still talk about it, because it’s heuristically useful. Some or all entities in the category may get new, formal, detailed and precise accounts, which are actually much more accurate than before reformulation, but the general case remains vague.

Burning sugar with sodium chlorate as oxidizer

For instance, fire was an ontologically basic, formal category for thousands of years. After the Chemical Revolution of the 1700s, it dropped out of official scientific theory. It’s an ill-formed category, because there are too many marginal cases. Informally, it describes redox reactions within a nebulous range of rates and temperatures, in which the oxidizer is typically but not necessarily oxygen. An explosion is a too-fast redox reaction; rusting is too slow to count; fuel cell reactions run too cold. Burning sugar with sodium chlorate as the oxidizer sure looks like a fire, but should it count? On the other hand, although “fire” is no longer a formal category, the Chemical Revolution made it possible to understand combustion in general, and particular redox reactions, vastly better than before.

“Species” was an ontologically basic, formal category in biology for thousands of years. Over the past few decades, better understanding of population dynamics has shown that it’s unavoidably nebulous. In general, there is no fact-of-the-matter about whether or not two individuals belong to the same species. However, as a consequence of that same remodeling, we understand speciation processes far better than when the category was taken to be well-defined.

In 2006, the category “planet” disintegrated into absurdity. It got a new, official definition, which most everyone loathes and ignores. Discovery of numerous marginal cases made it clear that “planets” have nothing meaningfully in common. However, we understand individual planets far better than before. And, “planet” is still useful as a vague category in some contexts, so long as you realize there is no fact-of-the-matter about whether Pluto counts.

In the third outcome of remodeling a category, it gets a new formal meaning. Gravity, for example, has been remodeled several times. It is not that we discovered new equations governing gravity each time—although that did happen. It’s that what gravity means changed. In general relativity, gravity is a wrinkle in spacetime; that is not what gravity is in Newtonian mechanics. Lumping and splitting are other ways a category can survive remodeling. The 2006 remodeling put Pluto in a newly invented category of “dwarf planets,” which (despite the name) are officially not counted as “planets.”

Informally, we can think of these three outcomes as points on a continuum. We might say a category is around 1.5 if it is mainly dropped as useless by experts, but retained in popular language, for instance. As for 2.5, whether or not a category counts as “basic,” “formal,” or “official” is itself often somewhat nebulous.

In The eggplant, I will concentrate on the second possible outcome of remodeling, although the others may be equally important in general. The meta-rational remodeling of rationality mainly demotes its categories from formal to informal status (outcome #2), but retains them as heuristically useful.

  • “Truth” comes out somewhere around 2.2. It’s best thought of as many different vaguely-similar nebulous ideas.
  • “Belief” may be somewhere around 1.6: a mostly-useless and misleading category if taken seriously, although it’s necessary for communication in everyday language.
  • “Rationality” gets a 2.7. It’s a grouping of usefully similar and reasonably well-defined methods that we should think about differently than we did before the meta-rational remodeling. There are marginal cases, though, so it’s not a 3.

Remodeling the planets

Diagram of the Ptolemaic universe
The Ptolemaic universe

In this section, I use shifting ideas about what counts as a planet as examples of ontological remodeling. I interweave scientific history with brief explanations of the meta-rational themes it illustrates. This isn’t a general history of the changing understandings of “planets”; I’ve selected particular episodes for their relevance to the themes of The eggplant. However, I find these shifts fascinating, both as science and as history, so I go into a fair amount of detail. I think you’ll learn some surprising facts!

Wandering lights

It has long been established, by both evidence and rationality, that the gods live in the sky. As gods are important, the sky is of great interest to scientists. Besides gods, who are rarely observed, we see three categories of objects in the sky, distinguished by their modes of motion:

  1. Transient objects with irregular, unpredictable motions, such as birds, clouds, and comets. These can be seen to be quite close to the earth, which is also characterized by chaotic unpredictability and transience, so this makes excellent sense and is consistent with rationality.
  2. The stars, which are eternally unchanging, and whose motions are perfectly circular. There’s a simple explanation: they are fires visible through tiny holes in a black sphere, centered on the earth, that revolves daily. The sphere is clearly hundreds of miles away, close to the immortal gods, so this is also highly rational.
  3. Seven wanderers, or “planetai” in Greek. These are the Moon, the Sun, Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Unlike stars, they speed up and slow down, slew sideways, and sometimes even go backward. Unlike birds and stuff, their motions are somewhat predictable, but in ridiculously complex patterns. This is not so obviously rational. What’s up with it?
Animation of the apparent retrograde motion of Mars
Animation of the apparent retrograde motion of Mars, courtesy Eugene Alvin Villar

Apparently the Wanderers are an intermediate category, for which we need a rational explanation. Aristotle and his colleague Eudoxus figured out the basics, and Ptolemy nailed the details. The planets are attached to spheres, made of pure, eternal, aetheric crystal. Through cunning arrangement of several dozen of them, each moving in a perfect circle, the apparently complex planetary motions become perfectly predictable.

Or, to within a few degrees of angular error, anyway.

Unemployed angels, spirals, and the dark

What causes the aetheric spheres to rotate? Scientific opinion has varied. By the end of the Middle Ages, the general consensus was that each sphere was turned by an angel.

Then a revolution put the celestial company of angelic laborers out of work. Lacking alternative opportunities for employment, they ceased to exist.

That is, by Galileo’s time, strong evidence had accumulated that there were no spheres, and therefore no angels. We have no need of that hypothesis.

This is an example of categories (aetheric spheres, angels) completely vanishing during an ontological remodeling: outcome #1.

By contrast, the question “what makes heavenly bodies move in such complicated patterns” has come through multiple remodelings intact (outcome #3). We’re still making progress on it. For instance, recent work on the magnetohydrodynamics of galaxies seems to be converging toward an explanation for their previously-mysterious spiral shapes.

But we’re still far from a complete story. No one has a clue about the apparent acceleration of the universe’s expansion. It is attributed to “dark energy”; but that is a mere dormitive principle: a science-y name masquerading as an explanation. “Acceleration requires energy by definition, and we can’t find any, so it must be ‘dark energy’.” But “dark energy” is not compatible with any currently-credible physical theory.

Copernicus remodels the planets

You will recall, from invented history, that Copernicus set off the Scientific Revolution in 1543 by proving that Aristotle, Eudoxus, and Ptolemy were wrong, because the earth goes around the sun. This did not happen.2 He did propose a heliocentric (sun-centered) model that became influential starting several decades after his death, however.

Copernicus retained all the previous ontological categories, including circular orbits and crystal spheres; they came through the remodeling intact (outcome #3). Mostly, only their relationships changed.

The category most transformed was “planet.” This had two intertwined aspects: an ontological remodeling of the category, plus empirical claims about the nature of specific objects.

Ontologically, where “planet” had meant “lights that wander in the sky,” it now meant “things that go around the sun.” Empirically, the claim was that all the old planets go around the sun, except the moon and the sun itself, so those are not really planets after all. Most troublingly, the earth too goes around the sun, so it is a planet.

The earth does not wander in the sky; it does not glow like the planets; it is extremely large, whereas most planets are mere pinpoints. Why call the earth a planet? This made absolutely no sense in Copernicus’ time. The claim appeared not false, but absurd: a category error. But for Copernicus, the earth was a planet exactly in that it does wander around the universe, instead of sitting still at the center.

Maybe heliocentrism would have succeeded sooner if Copernicus used a different word for his remodeled category! This is a common pattern, though: an existing word is repurposed during remodeling. There is no fact-of-the-matter about whether “planet” denoted a new, different category, or if the category itself changed and kept its same name. As in the Ship of Theseus and Grandfather’s Axe parables, the continuity of identity of categories over time is nebulous.

Heliocentrism: absurd on the face of it

It took well over a century after Copernicus for most scientists to adopt heliocentrism. That was not mainly because of opposition from the Church, nor due to blind adherence to traditional authorities. It was because empiricism and rationality both contradicted his theory. In fact, multiple heliocentric models had been proposed by the Ancient Greeks—Copernicus got the idea from them—and they were periodically revived up to his time. They had always been dismissed as fanciful, for lack of evidence or sense. So was Copernicus’—for a long time.

The puzzle is not “why didn’t scientists immediately adopt heliocentrism once Copernicus proved it was true?” but “why did anyone take him seriously at all, considering he failed to give any adequate reason to think it was true?”

There was no good observational evidence for heliocentrism until Galileo observed the phases of Venus in 1610. Copernicus’ arguments all invoked conceptual aesthetics, not evidence.

Copernicus’s model explained dramatically fewer phenomena than the state of the art.3 It is difficult to convey how extensive and important geocentrism’s implications were. It was woven, with rational arguments, into the whole Aristotelian and Medieval Christian worldview. All those explanations now seem absurd, but they were vital at the time. When geocentrism failed, the entire prevailing structure of certainty failed with it, and nihilism became a serious threat. That was dispelled only when a new structure of explanation was constructed on the Newtonian model: namely, the modern world, or “systematic mode” of meaningness. (There’s an interesting parallel here with the nihilism precipitated in the 20th century collapse of the modern structure of understanding.)

Copernicus’s model gave no more accurate predictions of planetary motions than the best available geocentric models. And, contrary to the invented history you may recall, Copernicus’ model was no simpler than previous ones. In particular, it had more epicycles, which he needed in order to eliminate equants, another type of technical kludge that he particularly disliked.

There was also excellent evidence against heliocentrism. For example, the absence of stellar parallax was considered a fatal flaw until much later, when astronomers recognized that the “fixed” stars must be ridiculously far away.4

Heliocentrism: not known to be unfixable

Ibn al-Shatir’s epicyclic model of Mercury

All geocentric systems—there were many—assumed an ontology of perfectly circular motions. To account for the apparently non-circular motions of the planets, they used complex combinations of epicycles, deferents, eccentrics, and equants. These were, effectively, mechanical linkages and offsets that produced complex motions as combinations of multiple circular ones.

The problem was to hook these devices up in a way to generate predictions that agreed with observations. Thousands of smart people worked on this for thousands of years, tinkering with the details, and made essentially no progress after Ptolemy (around 150 A.D.). The best models as of Copernicus’ time still predicted eclipses wrong by a day, and the position of Mars by a degree.

For astrologers, a day or a degree makes all the difference! This was highly unsatisfactory and discouraging. Most thought that eventually the discrepancies would be ironed out with a sufficiently clever arrangement of epicycles, but others recognized that something must be wrong.

For decades, the only people interested in Copernicus’ work were astro-math geeks who spent all their time trying to reorganize the gears to make the machine give the right answers. The fact that his system made absolutely no sense, considered as physics or cosmology, was not relevant for them. Astrologers were practical men, chronometric engineers whose livelihoods depended on accurate predictions, not highfalutin’ philosophy.5

Copernicus’ system was just another arrangement of circular motions via epicycles, deferents, and eccentrics. And it gave no better predictions than the state of the art. But it was sufficiently different that it wasn’t known to be unfixable. Every imaginable variant on geocentrism had been tried, and found not to work. Copernicus opened up new opportunities for obsessive tinkering that held out a reasonable hope of progress.

And, it turned out that other heliocentric arrangements could and did give somewhat more accurate results. Quite soon, everyone else relied on heliocentric calculations for prediction, even while firmly holding that they were a purely mathematical fiction—because, interpreted as physics, heliocentrism was a non-starter.

This is a pattern. When you are stuck, an alternative ontology may be attractive, even in the absence of other virtues, by giving you new ways of thinking about the problem.

Meta-rationality: not known to be unworkable

Just as problems with geocentrism had been known for centuries, problems with rationalism have been known for centuries. The logical positivists fixed some, but eventually gave up on trying to fix the rest. After centuries of failed attempts by super-smart people to create a workable version, it remains possible that somehow someone can make the overall approach succeed someday—but it no longer seems likely.

Heliocentrism had been around for centuries, and was only initially adopted by Copernicus and a few others in desperation, because it at least was something new to try.6

Analogously, meta-rationality has been around for more than half a century,7 and we can at least say that it’s not known to be unworkable. There has been continuing progress in making it handle more details; it seems plausible, to some smart people, that it can eventually encompass and supersede the rationalist worldview. However, it hasn’t been fully worked out, and it hasn’t been explained well,8 and for at least those reasons it is not widely accepted—or even known of.

Mistaken theories accumulate kludgy patches until there is a better alternative. Failure to account for data does not cause the demise of a theory. Rationalism persists, despite its well-known inadequacies, because it’s clearly better than irrationalism and anti-rationalism, the only well-known alternatives.

A meta-scientific revolution

Heliocentrism may be the most obvious example of ontological remodeling, because Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions highlighted it.

Historians agree that Kuhn’s book dealt the death-blow to logical positivism. That is not because he gave a knock-down argument against it; he didn’t attempt to. It is because, like geocentrism, it had become obvious that no one could make logical positivism work, despite decades of brilliant scientists and philosophers trying.9 Kuhn sketched an alternative that was radically different, plausible, and not known to be unworkable. And, it was easy to see how to fill in the details by doing more work of the sort he pioneered.

Kuhn had two big ideas. The first is that, if we want to know how science works, we need to look and see how people do it. That sounds obvious, and scientific. However, all previous attempts had been derived from a priori armchair theorizing about how, rationally, science ought to work. As soon you as compare those with reality, it’s obvious that they are totally false as accounts of how science does work. Somewhat less obviously, once you start to understand how science does work, you can see that rationalist ideas about how it ought to work are also wrong: it shouldn’t and couldn’t work that way.

By looking to see how science does work, Kuhn came to his second big idea. He found that science sometimes requires ontological remodeling, and that the type of reasoning scientists use for that is distinctively different from the type of reasoning they use when their ontology is adequate. During crisis periods, when an ontology breaks down, scientists evaluate, select, combine, modify, discover, and create alternatives. That is: “revolutionary science” requires meta-rational reasoning, whereas rationality is adequate for “normal science.”

Because he said that scientific progress depends on non-rational reasoning, Kuhn was widely misunderstood as advocating irrationalism—the only well-known alternative. Both his proponents and opponents jumped to the conclusion that, if he said scientific revolutions are not rational, he must mean they are intuitive, mystical, emotional, or political.10 That led to heaps of harmful New Age woo.

Kuhn’s confusing presentation11 also led to a horribly missed opportunity. Most scientists dismissed Kuhn’s observations. If he had explained them more clearly, scientists might have embraced them, and that might have led quickly to improved scientific practice.

Nevertheless, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was an instance of the thing it describes. It was a dramatic ontological remodeling of the scientific understanding of a domain of phenomena: in this case, science itself.

It is no longer credible to make theories about how science does or should work without taking into account detailed empirical evidence. It is no longer credible to claim that science is a solely rational activity. And there has been no serious attempt to construct a new rationalist account of science since Kuhn’s publication.

Gerrymandering the solar system

Ceres
Ceres: Object #1

The planet Ceres was discovered in 1801. It was found just where theory had predicted there should be a planet, between Mars and Jupiter. Over the next few years, three more planets were found in the same region: Palas, Juno, and Vesta.

Planetary symbols
Planetary symbols, 1850

Vesta was the last new planet until the 1840s. Then, within a few years, there came a dozen more. Inventing new planetary symbols for them became a headache. In 1851, that was resolved by giving them numbers instead. Ceres became object #1. But if they weren’t going to get planetary symbols, maybe they weren’t planets, even though they were “things that go around the sun,” which had been the meaning of “planet” since the heliocentric revolution. Anyway, they were small and boring, and who knows, there might be hundreds of them.12 The whole lot got demoted to “asteroids.”

Ceres and the others ceased to be planets—but “planet” was not actually redefined. There was no specific criterion given for why they didn’t count. For the next century and a half, “planet” was implicitly defined just as a list: these eight things (and then nine, with Pluto) are the planets. They share some family resemblance, so that was an entirely reasonable solution—although not formally rational. There were no marginal cases, so there was no need for a rigorous classification scheme.

As Heidegger observed in the seminal meta-rational text Being and Time, we only resort to formal rationality when reasonableness becomes inadequate. Even for most routine science, reasonableness does the job much of the time. When that breaks down, in a crisis, you need to step back and get rational. If that too fails—as it did in 2006—you have to get meta-rational.

“Planet” started to break down in the 1990s, as numerous marginal cases were discovered: both outside and inside our solar system.

The first exoplanet—orbiting a star other than our sun—was discovered in 1992, and many more soon followed. But this made practical a problem that had previously only been theoretical. What sorts of things orbiting a star count as planets?

There’s only three kinds of things that go around our sun: rocks, clouds, and snowballs. There’s all kinds of weird things going around other stars: gigantic diamonds, spacetime singularities, neutronium slag-heaps, and who knows what all else. Which ones should count as planets, and why? That problem made everyone uneasy; but it still hasn’t come to a head, and remains unresolved.

Meanwhile, there had long been reasons to think there might be more planets beyond Pluto, but none had been found. Starting also in 1992, several pretty big things were discovered out there. Should they count as planets?

Well, who cares? “It’s just a word…”

The International Astronomical Union cares, that’s who. They have to care, because in 1851 it was decided that non-planets get sequential object numbers, and planets don’t. It’s the IAU’s job to assign the numbers, and either the new things had to get them, or not. (This was a weird echo of Ceres being reclassified partly because of trouble with assigning new planetary symbols.) The IAU reached no decision for a decade.

Finally, the issue was forced by the discovery of Eris, named—deliberately—after the Greek goddess of discord. Eris is more massive than Pluto. If the argument for denying planetary status to the new things was that they weren’t big enough, relative to some arbitrary cut-off value, then either Eris is a planet, or Pluto isn’t.

The question became intensely political. Not only did some astronomers have passionate opinions, so did the public. The public’s opinion was that they learned in school that Pluto was a planet, and who are these clueless ivory tower eggheads to say otherwise? It might be interesting to understand that irrationality better;13 but still more mysterious was the “rational,” “scientific” debate.

The problem was that there is no rational classification scheme that includes the nine traditional planets while excluding Eris and her Trans-Neptunian friends.

In fact, there is no rational classification scheme that includes the nine traditional planets, period. They have nothing in common. Jupiter, for instance, is a medium-sized cloud, whereas Earth is a small rock. (Jupiter is “medium-sized” inasmuch as equivalent objects outside the solar system can get thirteen times bigger before they reach the critical mass for deuterium fusion and become brown dwarfs—objects that can’t make up their minds about whether they are big planets or small stars. Earth is “small” inasmuch as Jupiter has 318 times its mass and 1,321 times its volume.)

You could say that planets are “big enough” things that go around the sun; but what should the size cut-off be? You can bite the bullet and exclude Eris by demoting Pluto—which, to be fair, is much smaller than the other eight traditional planets. But then you have to pick some arbitrary size threshold, which doesn’t seem very rational. If you are going to do that, a more rational cutoff might fall in the huge gap between the small rocky planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars) and the big cloudy/snowy ones (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune).

Fortunately, there is another fairly natural size cutoff. Big enough objects collapse into a sphere, crushed by their own gravity. In 2005, as the crisis reached the boiling point, the most reasonable proposal was to define “planet” as “a sphere that goes around the sun.” This isn’t particularly rational, since it’s not clear why we should care either about going around the sun or sphericalness, but at least it’s concise.

Largest known Trans-Neptunian objects
Image courtesy Wikipedia user Lexicon

This proposal would have made Ceres a planet again—but not any of the other asteroids, because they aren’t quite big enough to collapse. It would also include Eris and half a dozen other spherical things beyond Pluto. I would have liked that, because they are cute. However, there may be hundreds of spheres out there, and in 2005—just as in 1851—many astronomers’ opinion was that having hundreds of planets is not OK.

So that proposal was rejected. Instead, in 2006, the IAU added a third criterion: to count as a planet, an object has to “clear the neighborhood around its orbit.” Eris and Pluto were declared to have failed to do so, and were made non-planets. Pluto, which we discovered had never really been a planet after all, got a belated number: 134340.

The IAU did not define what “clearing the neighborhood” means. No planet has fully cleared its orbit; there’s lots of minor junk in Earth’s neighborhood. Various complex mathematical definitions have since been suggested, all of which involve some arbitrary numerical cutoff for what counts as the neighborhood and how clear it has to be.

The 2006 definition put spherical things that go around the sun but don’t clear their neighborhoods—such as Ceres, Eris, and Pluto— in a newly invented category of “dwarf planets.” Those are officially ABSOLUTELY NOT PLANETS, despite the name.

The word “dwarf” betrays the agenda here. What proponents really wanted was a size cutoff between Eris and Mercury, the smallest of the remaining “real planets.” That would preserve the traditional list as nearly as possible. However, there’s no rational reason for drawing a line there, so they came up with sciencey-sounding “clearing” criterion instead.

Ignored during the debate was what seems to me a serious bug. Jupiter doesn’t go around the sun, and therefore is not a planet by the 2006 definition.

Don’t believe me? In Newtonian mechanics, two bodies orbit their barycenter, or center of mass. If they have equal masses, the barycenter is the midpoint between them. If one is heavier than the other, the barycenter is closer to it. If one has much greater mass than the other, their common barycenter is located within the larger body, and the smaller object goes around that point. Only then is the smaller body said to orbit the larger one. Otherwise, the two form a binary system.

Jupiter is ludicrously heavy: it has 2.5 times the mass of everything else in the solar system combined, apart from the sun. The sun is much heavier still—but the barycenter of their mutual orbit is outside it. Jupiter and the sun are a binary system. Their barycenter is, to be fair, quite close to the sun, and informally it may be reasonable to say Jupiter goes around it. But in terms of the formal definition, it doesn’t, so by the IAU criteria, Jupiter is not a planet.

Anyway, why is “goes around the sun” significant? If we’re interested in what’s there, we don’t care. “Goes around the sun” was meant to exclude large, spherical “moons,” seemingly just because they weren’t traditionally considered planets.

Jupiter is a useless blob, but its moons are the most likely places to find extraterrestrial life. Ganymede, the largest, is bigger than Mercury; and several are compositionally similar to the rocky planets. Considered on their own, it would make better sense to group them with Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars than with snowball moons that aren’t much bigger than a breadbox.

The resulting ontology can only be described as “gerrymandered.” Arbitrary boundaries were drawn to include and exclude particular objects, resulting in a contorted mess:

IAU classification of solar system bodies
IAU classification of solar system bodies, courtesy Wikipedia

Meta-rational lessons from a scientific failure

The planetary definition controversy, and its outcome, were a farce—as is widely recognized.

It is a case study in ontological remodeling having failed due to people trying to use rational, rather than meta-rational, methods. “There must be a correct answer” is the characteristic error of rationalist eternalism.

The problem in classifying solar system objects is that there are different dimensions on which they vary. For example, you could group them by their history (how and where and when they formed), their current characteristics in isolation (size, composition, surface temperature), or their orbital dynamics (barycenter, eccentricity, “neighborhood clearing”). These axes would cluster objects quite differently.

There is no correct answer—or, the right answer depends on what question you are asking. If you are interested in dynamics, it doesn’t matter what an object is made of; if you are interested in astrobiology, it doesn’t matter where it came from.

Meta-rationality treats all categories as inherently purpose-laden—including scientific categories. It rejects the rationalist ideal of perfectly disinterested Truth. Any useful categorization of solar system objects would group them according to a sub-discipline’s interests. Dynamicists and astrobiologists would naturally come up with different ones.

Meta-rationality accepts, applies, and coordinates multiple ontologies for a single domain. There isn’t a great example in our solar system, but astrobiologists exploring other star systems might need to take dynamical considerations into account. Hopefully they would have no difficulty holding both classification schemes in their heads at once. Investigating the ruins of an ancient civilization on an unusual natural object in the Alpha Centauri system, they should not get sucked into arguments about whether it is “really” a planet.

By trying to force a single, purpose-free ontology onto the solar system, the IAU process came up with a classification that is entirely useless. The legacy planet/non-planet distinction, which the 2006 redefinition did its best to preserve, does not line up with any property we now care about. Implicitly, it amounts to “observable with the telescope technology of the 1700s.” This is a pattern: people get attached to categories for irrational reasons, and find spurious, “rational” justifications for them long after they have ceased to function.

Meta-rationality treats all category boundaries as inherently nebulous and malleable. It recognizes that there are always marginal cases. Those have to be dealt with pragmatically—taking into account context and purpose—because there is no rational standard.

The IAU process took for granted that there had to be a sharp, definite distinction between planets and non-planets. (Saying “this is dumb, it doesn’t matter” was not considered an option. Either Eris was going to get a number, or not.) To its credit, the IAU recognized that an arbitrary size cutoff was irrational. However, faced with marginal cases, there was no other “rational” solution. The arbitrary cutoff was hidden behind the figleaf of the “clearing” criterion.

The problem the IAU faced was not one of linguistic ambiguity. It was not a problem with words and definitions. “It’s just a word!” was not a solution. It was a problem of ontology: how do we divide up the world? Once a boundary is chosen and agreed on, sorting out words is usually easy. (Especially for scientists, who understand better than most people that we can give technical terms any meanings we want.) Sometimes people get attached to particular words, and sometimes arguments are genuinely linguistic. However, in most arguments supposedly about word meanings, the underlying issue is ontological: where do we draw a boundary?

The IAU was aiming for remodeling outcome #3: an improved, formal definition of an existing category. What they got was outcome #2: the category has disintegrated, and de facto has no formal status. It’s widely understood that the 2006 definition is pointless and silly. The process crystalized the recognition that there is no longer any meaningful, definite category called “planet,” and there never will be one again. On the other hand, it remains perfectly reasonable to talk about “planets” in other star systems—so long as you recognize that this is an informal usage. Outcome #2 melted the category, but it is not that “there is no such thing as a planet” or “planets don’t exist.”

Pluto shoreline
Jagged shoreline of an icy nitrogen ocean on Pluto

Planetary science is now making extraordinary progress, without any meaningful definition. In 2006, almost nothing was known about Pluto besides its mass, diameter, and orbit. Last year, a space robot sent back 6.25 gigabytes of information about it—and the discoveries are stunning. We now know far more about planets than when they were a (misleading) category. That knowledge depends on, and also implies, understanding the details of their heterogeneity.

We understand what each specific planet is vastly better than ever before. But we don’t have any general theory of planets, because they don’t have anything meaningfully in common (that other things don’t).

In the case of the planetary definition debacle, the various meta-rational lessons I’ve drawn here should be obvious—which shows that meta-rationality is not restricted to esoteric masters, but available to anyone with basic rationality skills.

Taking the same analysis to the meta level…

After the meta-rational remodeling of the rationalist categories “truth,” “belief,” and “reasoning,” we can understand specific instances much better than in the rationalist view. It is not that “there is no such thing as a truth” or “truth doesn’t exist.” But we can’t have any general theory of truths, because they don’t have anything meaningfully in common. Different, informal notions of truth apply in different situations. Meta-rationality looks at details to understand how “truth” operates in specific contexts, for specific purposes.

  • 1. See “A first lesson in metarationality” for an introduction to ontological remodeling. I’ll return to the topic only briefly near the end of The eggplant. Detailed discussion of methods of remodeling will have to wait for future texts.
  • 2. My main source for the history of heliocentrism is Thomas Kuhn’s The Copernican Revolution, which I recommend highly. It is simultaneously super geeky and admirably easy to read. He wrote it sixty years ago, and probably there’s been significant historical research in the mean time. However, from casual investigation only, it appears that none of his main conclusions have been overturned.
  • 3. Copernican heliocentrism did explain some phenomena previous systems couldn’t. Particularly, it unambiguously determined the diameters of the planetary orbits. We’ll see that this is typical of ontological remodelings: the new and old models explain different subsets of phenomena, or explain them more and less well.
  • 4. Copernicus did give this explanation, to his credit. Stellar parallax was finally observed, after sufficiently accurate instruments were developed, in the 1800s.
  • 5. Besides astrologers, the other early enthusiasts for Copernicanism were Neoplatonic mystics. They thought, for spiritual reasons, that the universe ought to conform to simple mathematical rules; in their view Ptolemaic geocentrism was a godawful mess of kludges. The outstanding example was Kepler, whose heliocentrism was based on a Neoplatonic emanationist conviction that the Sun was God’s manifestation in the material realm, and therefore ought to be at the center of the universe. Fortuitously, his certainty that simple mathematical relationships must determine the cosmos led to his weird-but-true theory of elliptical orbits, which both dramatically simplified Copernicus’ system and gave much more accurate predictions. It also led to his elegant-but false theory that the distances between the planets related to the regular polyhedra. It’s interesting—but probably not significant—that the earliest advocates for what was later considered the first step in the Scientific Revolution were all woomeisters, who were right for the wrong reasons.
  • 6. In Copernicus’ own words: “I pondered long upon this uncertainty of mathematical tradition in establishing the motions of the system of the spheres. At last I began to chafe that philosophers could by no means agree on any one certain theory of the mechanism of the Universe, wrought for us by a supremely good and orderly Creator, though in other respects they investigated with meticulous care the minutest points relating to its circles. I therefore took pains to read again the works of all the philosophers on whom I could lay hand to seek out whether any of them had ever supposed that the motions of the spheres were other than those demanded by the mathematical schools. I found first in Cicero that Hicetas had realized that the Earth moved [and so did various other ancients; Copernicus quotes them here]. Taking advantage of this I too began to think of the mobility of the Earth; and though the opinion seemed absurd, yet knowing now that others before me had been granted freedom to imagine such circles as they chose to explain the phenomena of the stars, I considered that I also might easily be allowed to try whether, by assuming some motion of the Earth, sounder explanations than theirs for the revolution of the celestial spheres might so be discovered.”
  • 7. One might take as founding texts Heidegger’s Being and Time, published in German in 1927 and in English in 1962; Wittgenstein’s 1953 Philosophical Investigations; Kuhn’s 1962 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; and Garfinkel’s 1967 Studies in Ethnomethodology. Key later works include Kegan’s 1982 The Evolving Self and Schön’s 1983 The Reflective Practitioner.
  • 8. Each of the books I listed as a key meta-rational text is famously difficult to read. I would suggest going to secondary sources before tackling the originals.
  • 9. Kuhn was in the right place at the right time. If he had published the same book thirty years earlier, it might have had much less impact, because logical positivism still seemed to be making progress.
  • 10. Intuition, mysticism, emotions, and politics do all play some role in most scientific revolutions—as they do in all human activity. They are not the way scientific revolutions produce better ontologies, though.
  • 11. One major problem was that Kuhn used the word “paradigm” for several quite different concepts. Consequently, “paradigm shift” has come to mean anything, and therefore nothing. (“Ontological remodeling” is one of the phenomena Kuhn was pointing at, but he didn’t use that phrase.) Another problem was that he didn’t apply any unifying label to the various sorts of reasoning I’m calling “meta-rational.” He just pointed out specific examples and some patterns. If he had labeled the category, it would have been easier to understand what he was contrasting with rationality. It would have been harder to imagine it was mysticism. His 1969 Postscript to the second edition tried to fix these problems, but it was already too late. If you read the book, don’t skip the Postscript! In fact, it might be the best place to start.
  • 12. A plausible hypothesis, but wrong. There are millions of asteroids, not hundreds. Probably billions, depending on where you arbitrarily cut off their lower size limit.
  • 13. Neil deGrasse Tyson wrote a book about this, The Pluto Files, with many quotations from the public debate. It’s a lot of fun, but doesn’t give much insight into why anyone cared.

Fluid self in relationship

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

This page will introduce the implications of the fluid mode for personal psychology and our conceptions of our selves and close relationships.

For an overview, see the Fluidity section of “Developing ethical, social, and cognitive competence.”

Fluid society

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

This page will introduce the social implications of the fluid mode. For a preview, see “[Desiderata for any future mode of meaningness](/fluidity-desiderata).”

Fluid culture: metamodernism

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

This page will introduce the cultural implications of the fluid mode.

For a preview, see "Desiderata for any future mode of meaningness."

For introductions to metamodernism, see Philip Damico's "Introduction" and Seth Abramson's "What Is Metamodernism?" and "Metamodernism: The Basics."

Hanzi Freinacht1 has developed metamodernism beyond culture narrowly, into a general conception including cognition, personal psychology, and social organization. He draws on many of the same sources I do, and points in many of the same directions. His web site is Metamoderna. Tom Amarque has produced a fine podcast interview with him; if you are familiar with my work, you'll find many of the same themes raised.

Naturally, I differ with each of these thinkers on some points.

  • 1. "Hanzi Freinacht" is a pseudonym for a team of two people, apparently.

Appendix: Glossary

This is a glossary of words I've used in non-standard ways in Meaningness. Ones in blue link to pages that discuss them in more detail.

accomplishment
“Accomplishing” a stance means adopting it consistently whenever its dimension of meaningness comes up. This is difficult and rare; perhaps psychologically impossible.
adoption
“Adopting” a stance means using its pattern of feeling and thinking to address the dimension of meaningness it relates to. Often one adopts a stance only momentarily, and typically without noticing it.
allied stance
Some stances ally with others, based on a shared emotional “texture,” or on making similar promises, or because they provide plausibility for each other. For example, the stance True Self allies with monism because it is a ploy for explaining away your apparent limitations and differences from other people. Other stances clash with each other. For example, True Self does not go well with nihilism, because the True Self is supposed to be extremely meaningful, and nihilism denies all meaningfulness.
appropriation
“Appropriating” a confused stance means using it as a communicative tool, while actually adopting the corresponding complete stance instead.
atomized mode
The atomized mode of relating to meaningness abandons coherence, but provides access to all of globalized culture via the internet. The atomized mode resembles nihilism because systems of meaning are impossible. There are no standards for comparing value, so everything seems equally trivial, and equally a crisis. However, whereas the threat of nihilism is the loss of all meaning, the atomized world delivers far too much meaning, in a jumbled stream of bite-sized morsels, like sushi flowing past on a conveyer belt, or brilliant shards of colored glass in a kaleidoscope.
causality
The stance that everything happens for a reason, in accord with the Cosmic Plan; except perhaps that free will allows us to violate the Plan.
chaos
Chaos is the stance that nothing happens for any particular reason; the universe is essentially random.
choiceless mode
In the choiceless mode, you are unaware of differences of opinion concerning meaningness. You take meanings for granted, without asking “why” questions. It could also be called the communal mode or “tradition.”
commitment
Committing to a stance means resolving to adopt it consistently, whenever the dimension of meaningness it addresses comes up.
complete stance
Complete stances acknowledge the nebulosity and pattern of meaningness, avoiding the errors of fixation and denial. They are more difficult to adopt than confused stances, but are more workable in the long run.
confused stance
Confused stances try to avoid the anxiety of ambiguity through fixation and denial of a dimension of meaningness.
Cosmic Plan
I use “Cosmic Plan” to refer to any idea of an ultimate source of meaning, such as God, the Absolute, destiny, Reason, highest consciousness, or whatever. All such ideas are inherently eternalistic.
countercultural mode
The countercultural mode of relating to meaningness attempts to develop a new, alternative, universalist, eternalist, anti-rational system for society, culture, and self, that is meant to replace the mainstream. I discuss two countercultures in depth, the monist “hippie” counterculture of the 1960s-70s, and the “Moral Majority” counterculture of the 1970s-80s. Both failed because neither’s vision appealed to a majority, and they could not accommodate diversity, due to their universalism.
denial
Denial is the psychological strategy of refusing to admit the existence or significance of meaningness. It is one defense against the anxiety provoked by nebulosity. See also fixation, another defense.
dimension
Meaningness has various “dimensions”: purpose, personal value, ethics, sacredness, and so forth.
dualism
Dualism is the confused stance that everyone and everything is a clearly distinct, separate, independently-existing individual.
enjoyable usefulness
Enjoyable usefulness is the stance that purposes are co-created in an appreciative, compassionate dance with the world; both mundane and eternal purposes can be meaningful; you might as well find things to do that are both enjoyable for you and useful for others.
essentialism
Essentialism is the view that every object has a well-defined, objective "essence": a hidden true nature, consisting of fixed properties that determine what sort of thing it is and how it must behave. Relying on fixation, it is closely related to eternalism, the denial of nebulosity. Relying on definiteness, and with the assumption that the universe can be objectively divided into objects, with objectively definite properties, it is closely related to dualism.
eternal ordering principle
An “eternal ordering principle” (or Cosmic Plan) is any supposed fundamental basis for the universe, providing an ultimate source of value, ethics, and explanation. God, Fate, Rationality, The Absolute, Cosmic Consciousness, Progress, Science, and many other candidate fundamental principles have been proposed. The view of this book is that there is no such thing.
eternal purpose
“Eternal” purposes are supposed to transcend death. Artistic accomplishment and altruistic activity are typical examples.
eternalism
Eternalism is the stance that sees the meaning of everything as fixed by an external principle, such as God or a Cosmic Plan. It forms a false dichotomy with nihilism, which regards everything as meaningless. The stance of meaningness recognizes the fluid mixture of meaningfulness and meaninglessness in everything.
ethical eternalism
Ethical eternalism is the stance that there is a fixed ethical code according to which we should live. The eternal ordering principle is usually seen as the source of the code.
ethical nihilism
Ethical nihilism is the stance that ethics are a meaningless human invention and have no real claim on us.
ethical responsiveness
Ethical responsiveness is the stance that ethics are not a matter of personal or cultural choice, but are fluid and have no definite source.
existentialism
In this book, existentialism means the stance that meaningness is subjective. In contrast, eternalism and nihilism both assume that meaningness must be objective. Usually existentialists also say meaning should be a purely individual creation: a perfectly free choice, possible only when you throw off all cultural assumptions and social pressures. That is not actually possible, and existentialism collapses into nihilism when you seriously attempt it. The complete stance is that all three are wrong: meaningness is neither subjective nor objective. It is a collaborative accomplishment of dynamic interaction.
fixation
Fixation is the psychological strategy of attaching spurious certainty and definiteness to pattern. It is one defense against the anxiety provoked by nebulosity. See also denial, the other defense.
intermittently continuing
Intermittently continuing is the stance that selfness comes and goes, varies over time, and has no essential nature.
materialism
“Materialism” has two meanings in this book, which are only distantly related. Mainly, I use it to refer to the stance according to which only self-aggrandizing, mundane purposes (such as money, sex, power, and fame) count as truly meaningful. It also refers to the metaphysical belief that only things made from physical matter exist.
meaningness
“Meaningness” is the quality of being meaningful and/or meaningless. It has various dimensions, such as value, purpose, and significance. This book suggests that meaningness is always nebulous—ambiguous and fluid—but also always patterned. Confusion about meaningness results from denying nebulosity or fixating pattern.
meta-rationality
Meta-rationality means thinking about and acting on rational systems from the outside, in order to use them more effectively. It evaluates, selects, combines, modifies, discovers, and creates rational methods. Meta-rationalism is an understanding of how and when and why rational systems work. It avoids taking them as fixed and certain, and thereby avoids both cognitive nihilism and rationalist eternalism.
mission
“Mission” is the stance that holds that only your unique, eternal, transcendent purpose is truly meaningful.
mode of meaningness
How meaning fell apart” suggests a series of modes of relating to meaningness. In the choiceless mode, meaningness is taken as given, without question. In the systematic mode, meanings have to be justified. (This is closely connected with eternalism.) As systematic justifications break down, the countercultural, subcultural, and atomized modes are successive attempts to relate to the fragmentation of meaning. Finally, the fluid mode synthesizes the functional aspects of all the previous ones.
monism
Monism is the confused stance that All is One; that my true self is mystically identified with the Cosmic Plan; that all religions and philosophies point to the same ultimate truth.
muddled middle
Confused stances come in mirror image pairs: extreme views on meaningness. Each pair shares an underlying mistaken metaphysical assumption about the nature of meaning. A muddled middle is an attempt to compromise between the extremes, to find a correct middle way. These fail because they do not correct the metaphysical error. The stance that corrects the error is complete, meaning that it neither fixates nor denies any aspect of meaningness.
mundane purpose
Mundane purposes are those that humans share with other animals. They are mostly self-centered (security, power, reproduction); but also include limited altruism, on behalf of one’s immediate relatives.
native mode
Your native mode of relating to meaningness is the one you are most comfortable using. Typically people adopt the mode that is most popular during their late teens and early twenties. Thus, for most Baby Boomers, the countercultural mode is native; for Generation X, it is the subcultural mode; and for Millennials, the atomized mode.
nebulosity
Nebulosity is the insubstantiality, transience, boundarilessness, discontinuity, and ambiguity that (this book argues) are found in all phenomena.
next stance
Because stances are unstable, it’s common to wobble from one to the next, without even noticing. There are predictable patterns of which stances are likely to follow another as it becomes untenable, based on the emotional logic of the first stance’s failure and the next one&rsqo;s promise.
nihilism
Nihilism is the stance that regards everything as meaningless. It forms a false dichotomy with eternalism, which sees everything as having a fixed meaning. The stance of meaningness recognizes the fluid mixture of meaningfulness and meaninglessness in everything.
nobility
Nobility is the stance that resolves specialness and ordinariness. Nobility consists in using whatever capacities one has on behalf of others.
non-existence
Confused stances allied with nihilism often insist that a particular sort of meaning is entirely non-existent. Such meanings are usually only nebulous (vague), rather then absent.
ordinariness
Ordinariness is the confused stance that no one is better than anyone else, and that one’s value derives from herd membership.
participation
Participation is the stance that there is no single right way of drawing boundaries around objects, or between self and other. Things are connected in many different ways and to different degrees; they may also be irrelevant to each other, or to you. Connections are formed by meaningful, on-going interaction.
pattern
Pattern is the quality that makes phenomena interpretable: regularity, causality, distinctness, form.
rationalism
Rationalisms are ideologies that claim that there is some way of thinking that is the correct one, and you should always use it. Some rationalisms specifically identify which method is right and why. Others merely suppose there must be a single correct way to think, but admit we don?t know quite what it is; or they extol a vague principle like “the scientific method.” Rationalism is not the same thing as rationality, which refers to a nebulous collection of more-or-less formal ways of thinking and acting that work well for particular purposes in particular sorts of contexts. See also: meta-rationalism.
really
“Really” is a weasel-word. It is used to intimidate you into accepting dubious metaphysical claims. When someone uses it, substitute “in some sense,” and then ask “in what sense?”
reasonable respectability
The stance that one should contribute to social order by conforming to traditions.
religiosity
Religiosity is the confused stance that the sacred and profane are kept always clearly distinct by the eternal ordering principle.
resolution
Confused stances are resolved by dissolving their fixations and accepting what they deny. Specific “antidotes” or counter-thoughts are available that help with this.
romantic rebellion
The stance of defying authority, in an unrealistic way, to make an artistic statement.
Romanticism
Romanticism—in this book—is the view that the True Self is mystically connected with The Entire Universe. The "True Self" is spiritual and emotional and intuitive, so Romanticism is anti-rational. Romanticism is closely related with monism, since it imagines connections that do not actually exist. Unlike monism, however, Romanticism does not deny all differences. Historically, it was primarily an aesthetic movement, based on the idea that ultimate reality expressed itself through the artist's True Self based on their special connection.
secularism
“Secularism,” as used in this book, refers to the confused stance that nothing is sacred.
selflessness
“Selflessness” is the confused stance that there is, or should be, no self. Some interpretations of the Buddhist doctrine of anatman are examples, as are some Christian ideas of saintliness.
specialness
Someone is thought to be special if they are given a particular distinct value by the (imaginary) Cosmic Plan. This is not actually possible.
stabilization
Stances toward meaningness are inherently unstable, because they fail to fit reality or are emotionally unattractive. One uses specific patterns of thinking, feeling, talking, and acting to stabilize a stance, making it easier to remain in it. Typically this is unconscious, but with practice one can deliberately deploy particular patterns to move from one stance to another.
stance
A stance is a basic attitude toward meaningness, or toward a dimension of meaningness. Most stances wrongly fixate meaningness, or deny the existence or nebulosity of a dimension of meaningness. Typically stances come in pairs, which form false dichotomies. The simplest examples are eternalism and nihilism.
subcultural mode
The subcultural mode abandons the attempt to find universal meanings suitable for everyone. Earlier modes of meaningness claimed to base such meanings on some foundational eternal ordering principle—but there is none. Subculturalism abandons eternalism and instead provides multiple “neotribal” systems of meaning that are meant to appeal only to small communities (subsocieties) of like-minded people.
system
“Systems,” in this book, are conceptual, methodological, and institutional structures that make claims about meaningness. These include, for instance, religions, philosophies, political ideologies, and psychological frameworks. A system includes a structure of justification, which explains why you should believe its claims, and typically grounds in an eternal ordering principle. I contrast systems with stances, which are much simpler attitudes toward meaningness.
systematic mode
The systematic mode attempts to justify all meanings with some explanatory structure. Typically, this system builds on a foundational eternal ordering principle. The systematic mode is eternalistic, claiming to offer absolute certainty, understanding, and control. In the late twentieth century, it became clear that this is impossible, and the systematic mode failed.
total responsibility
Total responsibility is the stance that we each create our own reality and are solely responsible for everything that happens in it.
true self
The “deep" or “true” or “authentic” self is an imaginary, inaccessible superior identity, which has a magical connection with the Cosmic Plan. “Depth psychology” is particularly big on the true self, but this confused idea has become wide-spread.
ultimate
“Ultimate” and “ultimately” are words that often turn up in discussions of meaningness. They can be legitimate, but are often advertising hype, obfuscation, or intimidation.
victim-think
The stance that “it's not my fault and I am too weak to deal with it.”
wavering
When you have committed to a stance, but have not accomplished it, then you are “wavering.” Wavering means that you are trying to adopt a stance consistently, but are finding it difficult or impossible to do so.

Appendix: Further reading

Meaningness mainly re-presents material well-understood elsewhere. I have gathered ideas from several fields and explained them in terms a different audience will understand. Since most of the book is not yet written, you may want to go back to my sources to fill the gaps. You may also want to know where the ideas came from, to understand them in their original context; or go deeper and further than Meaningness ever will.

This page describes some of the texts that have most influenced the work, with brief explanations of how they are relevant. Some are articles, but most are full-length books. (I’ve linked those to Amazon, who send me about $3/day in exchange.)

I have roughly categorized them by subject. I plan to add more texts, and more categories, as work on Meaningness proceeds. Here are links to the current categories:

Fundamental texts

These are all brilliant, major works. Historians agree that they represented significant intellectual breakthroughs at the time.

Most are also extremely hard going. That is at least partly because their authors were working at the edge of what was thinkable at the time, and struggling to explain insights that were at the limits of the authors’ own understanding. In several cases, I recommend alternative, secondary sources that re-presented these breakthrough works in later eras, when the ideas had been worked through and became better understood. Reading the originals is valuable, but may prove impossible without a guide.

Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche introduced the problem of nihilism and eternalism—the fundamental theme of Meaningness—to Western thought. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that, ever since, the Continental branch of philosophy has consisted of working through Nietzsche’s ideas.

Nietzsche is fun and easy to read. Working at the edge of the thinkable, much of what he says is obviously wrong. It is often unclear whether he has made an actual mistake, or was joking, or was insane; or if he wasn’t sure—and didn’t care—whether he was serious.

I’ve read almost all his books, and recommend almost all of them, although his last few works are the best.

My favorite is Twilight of the Idols, or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer, which summarizes much of his thought. It is probably his most straightforward presentation of nihilism and eternalism. The single-page chapter “How the ‘True World’ finally became a fable” is an intense summary of his summary—and also of the whole Western philosophical tradition and what is wrong with it.1 He thought he was about to work out the solution to nihilism, and proclaimed it as:

Bright day; breakfast; return of bon sens and cheerfulness; Plato’s embarrassed blush; pandemonium of all free spirits.

Unfortunately he had a total, permanent mental breakdown a few months later, and so never wrote up the answer.

Nietzsche’s most famous work is Thus Spake Zarathustra, which is also the only one I wouldn’t recommend. It’s a tedious melodramatic parable, and the thinking is atypically muddled. People seem to like it because it’s a story.

Mipham

In Buddhist philosophy, the problem of nihilism and eternalism goes back a couple thousand years. I use Buddhism’s word “eternalism” because there’s nothing equivalent in Western philosophical language. That’s because eternalism has been Western thought’s main topic from the beginning. Fish have no word for water, and the two main Western ideologies—Christianity and rationalism—are both eternalistic. India had both eternalistic and nihilistic ideologies, and Buddhism positioned itself as the “neither of the above” alternative.

Unfortunately, the Buddhist analysis of nihilism and eternalism is a godawful mess. The first major author, Nagarjuna, was severely confused, but he was so extremely holy that you aren’t allowed to contradict him. So there’s two thousand years of brilliant thinkers trying to understand and explain the issues without quite saying that Nagarjuna got everything wrong. Despite that constraint, they made considerable progress over the centuries.

The Nyingma branch of Buddhism, to which I belong, considers Ju Mipham’s Beacon of Certainty the definitive text. I think it gives a simple, obviously correct solution to the problem of eternalism and nihilism that Nietzsche first raised in the West. My original idea for Meaningness was to write a short, straightforward explanation of Mipham’s answer. I have failed spectacularly: Meaningness is several hundred thousand words so far, and is maybe 15% finished.

The Beacon of Certainty may be the most difficult book I’ve ever read. I absolutely do not recommend it—although I’m including it here because it is the root text for Meaningness. To make any sense of the Beacon, you need to have spent years studying less-difficult Buddhist texts.

Unfortunately, there is no less-difficult text I can recommend.2 The whole field sucks. Your best bet is to get oral explanations from someone who has mastered it. They are sometimes willing to say things in person that they wouldn’t dare write.

Mipham was two years younger than Nietzsche, and they wrote their major works around the same time. Their life stories and works are parallel in fascinating ways. They both wrote abstruse academic philosophy and they both wrote wild, prophetic, heterodox quasi-religious allegories. I wish I could introduce them to each other.

Heidegger

Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time was the first and most important Western attempt to solve Nietzsche’s problem of nihilism and eternalism.

The first part of Being and Time analyzed what life is like in a completely new way, which I think points toward the solution. Heidegger abandoned the fundamental eternalist assumption that meaning must come from some ordering principle such as God or rationality. He showed how life is structured instead by “circumspection,” a non-dual awareness in which everyday circumstances show up as always already meaningful in our interactions with them. This understanding of meaning as neither objective nor subjective, but interactive is fundamental to Meaningness.

Then Heidegger took a wrong turn. The further analysis of meaning he developed in the second half of the book was definitely mistaken (as he later acknowledged).

Being and Time was probably the most influential philosophy book of the 20th century. Jean-Paul Sartre completely misunderstood it and based his Being and Nothingness on his further distortion of Heidegger’s most-mistaken part. That was the root text for mid-20th-century existentialism, and a lot of subsequent pretentious and harmful intellectual nonsense. More productively, Michel Foucault—discussed below—mainly wrestled with Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s problems.

Being and Time is extremely hard going—up there with the Beacon of Certainty. I’d recommend reading Hubert Dreyfus’ Being-in-the-World first or instead. That is an explanation of the first, accurate part of Heidegger’s book. It’s not easy, but it’s much easier than Being and Time itself.

I’ve written about how Heidegger and Dreyfus influenced Meaningness briefly here.

Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote two main books. His first, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, was one of the central texts of logical positivism—the major rationalist-eternalist movement of the first half of the 20th century. Later, he realized that couldn’t work, and wrote Philosophical Investigations to explain why. The book is probably the most influential in all of analytic philosophy. (The two major schools of 20th century Western philosophy were the Continental (French and German) and analytic (English-speaking) traditions.)

Working in parallel with Heidegger, but independently, Wittgenstein analyzed everyday practical activity, and came to the same conclusion. Meaning resides in interaction, rather than in our heads or in objects.

In a weird parallel, just as 20th century existentialism began as a drastic misunderstanding of Being and Time, analytic philosophy not only missed Wittgenstein’s main point, but has mostly promoted its exact opposite. Philosophical Investigations argues that language acquires its nebulous meaning only in everyday practical use, and that philosophical problems mainly derive from taking it out of context. Analytic philosophy has tended instead to attempt to eliminate nebulosity by taking language out of context, in order to figure out precisely what it should mean. Wittgenstein was too radical for his age, and his supposed followers headed straight back to the apparent comfort of rationalist eternalism.

Philosophical Investigations is difficult, but not impossible to read if you have a basic knowledge of 20th century philosophy. I don’t know of a good summary or introduction to it. (If you do, please leave a comment below!)

Garfinkel

Harold Garfinkel founded the discipline called ethnomethodology, which is the empirical study of everyday practical activity. Like Heidegger and Wittgenstein, Garfinkel found that meaning lives in interaction. But whereas they derived their conclusions from informal reflection on personal experience, ethnomethodology observes other people doing meaningful things in meticulous detail—typically through obsessive analysis of video tapes. Particularly interesting for me are the many ethnomethodological studies of laboratory scientists running experiments.

Garfinkel’s major work is Studies in Ethnomethodology. It’s completely incomprehensible until you have got the main ideas from a less dense text by someone else. John Heritage’s Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology is the best introduction, although it’s still not easy, and does not cover all important aspects of the field. Lucy Suchman’s Plans and Situated Actions—discussed below—could be an alternative starting point, uniquely accessible to the STEM-educated, although it was not intended for the purpose.

Garfinkel was probably strongly influenced by Heidegger and Wittgenstein, although he didn’t acknowledge that. He was a coyote trickster… Carlos Castaneda wrote his first two books of fictional psychedelic anthropology as his Batchelor’s and PhD theses under Garfinkel’s supervision. Some scholars believe Castaneda’s imaginary guru, the “Yaqui sorcerer” Don Juan Mateus, was based partly on Garfinkel. Don Juan advised Carlos to erase his personal history; Garfinkel seems to have followed that same advice, and it’s hard to figure out quite where his ideas came from.3

It’s also hard to figure out quite where they went. Ethnomethodology imploded in the early 1990s, for reasons I only partly understand. I want to encourage its recent revival.

Meta-rationality

Rationalism, an eternalist ideology, is false, as Heidegger and Wittgenstein explained. However, formal rationality often works. Indeed, it’s the basis of modern civilization, and therefore hugely valuable and important. So how and when and why does rationality work? Meta-rationalism is the empirical investigation of that question. It has found some preliminary answers.

Kuhn

No one has read Thomas “Paradigm Shift” Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions because everyone thinks they know what it says. It doesn’t say that.

Kuhn had two big ideas, as I discussed in “A meta-scientific revolution.” The first was that if you want to know how science works, you have to look and see what scientists do. Rationalist theories explain how science ought to work, according to armchair theorizing from first principles. But it doesn’t work like that at all. And once you understand how it does work, from empirical investigation, you can see that it couldn’t and shouldn’t work the way rationalism prescribes, either.

Kuhn’s second big idea was that science sometimes requires ontological remodeling, and the type of reasoning scientists use for that is quite different from the type of reasoning they use when their ontology is adequate. During crisis periods, when an ontology breaks down, scientists evaluate, select, combine, modify, discover, and create alternatives. “Revolutionary science” requires meta-rational thinking, whereas rationality is adequate for “normal science.”

Because he said that scientific progress depends on non-rational processes, Kuhn was widely misunderstood as advocating irrationalism—the only well-known alternative. In a Postscript, added in the second edition, he explains clearly the difference between his view and anti-rational relativism. If you read the book, don’t skip the Postscript! In fact, it might be the best place to start.

Schön

Donald Schön’s The Reflective Practitioner: How professionals think in action is the closest thing we have to a manual of meta-rationality.

Schön observed in detail how experts in five technical fields addressed nebulous problems. He found that technical rationality—“the formulas learned in graduate school”—doesn’t cut it. Those methods only apply when a problem has already been well-characterized—that is, translated into a formal vocabulary. That is not what a civil engineer encounters in the field: what you find there is water and rocks and dirt, and it’s a mess. It’s not what a project manager encounters in a tech company: what you find there is a bunch of people squabbling about a slipped schedule, and it’s a mess. Rationality solves formal problems, but that’s not what expert professionals do. They transform nebulous messes.

Meta-rationality requires understanding the relationship between a particular clear-cut rational system and a particular messy, nebulous reality. The “solution” to a slipped schedule undoubtedly involves fiddling with a GANTT chart, or some similar project-management formalism. However, the mess can’t be “solved” entirely, or mainly, in this formal domain. The manager needs to understand how the GANTT chart relates to what people are actually doing.

There can be no fixed method for this; it’s inherently improvisational. That does not imply mystical intuitive woo. It means a lot of well-thought-out practical activity, immersing yourself in the mess, and reflecting on how specific rational methods could work in this concrete situation.

Mastery of professional practice is not the ability to solve cut-and-dried problems. That’s for junior staff, straight out of school. Professional mastery is the ability to re-characterize a nebulous real-world situation as a collection of soluble technical problems.

Kegan

Robert Kegan’s model of adult psychological development profoundly shapes my understanding of meta-rationality—as well as ethics, relationships, and society. I wrote about his work overall here.

His two major books are The Evolving Self and In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life.

Kegan’s account of meta-rationality is frustratingly abstract, but his explanation of the ways it restructures the self gives insights not available elsewhere.

I’ll discuss Kegan’s work again below, in the sections on psychology and ethics.

Computation, AI, and cognitive “science”

Dreyfus

Hubert Dreyfus was both the foremost English-language Heidegger scholar and the most incisive critic of cognitive science, especially artificial intelligence.

What Computers Still Can’t Do was the most recent in his series of explanations of how AI went wrong. His arguments were dismissed as idiotic philosophical misunderstandings by the field for decades, but were mainly proven correct by time. It was AI that was an idiotic philosophical misunderstanding…

Being-in-the-World, which I mentioned earlier as a guide to Heidegger’s Being and Time, also explained in detail how Heidegger’s understanding of everyday activity refutes cognitive “science.” (I put the word “science” in quotes to indicate that the field’s overall program was not scientific, but ideological, mistaken, and harmful. Lots of good and genuine science was done under the rubric “cognitive science” despite that.)

Dreyfus’ All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age, written with Sean Dorrance Kelly, has nothing to do with AI, but it’s much easier to read than his other books. It’s an inquiry into the problem of meaningness: how to avoid both eternalism and nihilism, by recognizing the inseparability of nebulosity and pattern. I wrote a long series of tweets about it, with excerpts from the book, starting here.

Suchman

Lucy Suchman’s Plans and Situated Actions is a remarkable cross-disciplinary synthesis. Originally trained in anthropology, Suchman also studied ethnomethodology, was a student of Hubert Dreyfus, and had thoroughly assimilated Heidegger’s account of everydayness and Dreyfus’ critique of cognitivism.

But she worked at Xerox PARC. In the 1970s, essentially all the elements of modern computer systems were either invented at PARC, or given their first practical implementation there. (See Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, then Ignored, the First Personal Computer for a history.) PARC’s visionary director John Seely Brown then built an AI and cognitive science team that surpassed all but the top few university programs of the time.

So Suchman also learned to think and talk like a cognitive scientist, which made her uniquely positioned to bridge the conceptual gap between rationalist and situated accounts of practical activity. Her book was the biggest direct influence on my PhD thesis work, and much of my understanding of everydayness I owe to her.

In the early 1980s, Xerox bet its future on a physically huge, incredibly expensive, and vastly complicated new office copier. Unfortunately, no one could figure out how to use it.

AI to the rescue! Some of the foremost experts in AI action theory developed an intelligent user interface / tutoring system that told you exactly what you needed to do.

Suchman filmed famous cognitive scientists trying to use it… and the bafflement and swearing that ensued. If you remember Microsoft’s rage-inducing Clippy The Intelligent Office Assistant, you can imagine the scene.

By careful analysis of what went wrong in their interactions with the system, she showed how breakdowns were consequences of mistaken rationalist assumptions, and how they could be understood in terms of ethnomethodological conversation analysis.

Suchman’s relatively STEM-friendly language made philosophically sophisticated theories of action available to computer professionals. That changed the course of AI research. Plans and Situated Actions was even more influential in the fields of human-computer interaction and user experience design.

Agre and Chapman

As I recounted in “I seem to be a fiction,” Phil Agre and I eventually got Dreyfus’ critique of AI, with Lucy Suchman’s help. In the late 1980s, together we set about reforming the field to incorporate their insights.

Agre’s Computation and Human Experience is the overall best account of his work, and of our joint work. It’s a unique masterpiece. Like Suchman’s book, it’s a synthesis of Continental philosophy, empirical ethnomethodology, and deep insights into what can and cannot be computed by brains—but in Agre’s book, there’s code too.

My book on our work was Vision, Instruction, and Action.

A brief theoretical overview was “Abstract Reasoning as Emergent from Concrete Activity,” available on this site.

Winograd and Flores

In the late 1960s, Terry Winograd designed SHRDLU, perhaps the most impressive AI system of all time. In the mid-’80s, he recognized that Dreyfus’ critique was mainly correct.

The first half of his Understanding Computers and Cognition, written with Fernando Flores, is a short, clear meta-rational account of human activity. It is written for the STEM-educated, and may well be the best overall introduction if that’s you. For some readers, it may be a bit too short, with not quite enough detail to enable you to grasp meta-rationality.

(The second half of the book is based on speech act theory, a rationalist account of language that seems to clash with the meta-rationalism of the first half.)

I took the title of my book In the Cells of the Eggplant from a dialog in Understanding Computers and Cognition:

A. Is there any water in the refrigerator?
B. Yes.
A. Where? I don't see it.
B. In the cells of the eggplant.

Was “there is water in the refrigerator” true?

That question can only be answered meta-rationally: “True in what sense? Relative to what purpose?”

Smith

Brian Cantwell Smith is the foremost philosopher of computation. Actually, as far as I know, he is the only philosopher of computation. “Philosophy of Computation” is a field that doesn’t exist.

“Right—because Church and Turing said everything that can be said about that!” Nope.

What is a computer? A computer is a machine that means things. If you fight your way through six CRUD screens on a hotel reservation site, you reach a web page that means you have reserved a room on Woolloomooloo Wharf next weekend. If it doesn’t mean that, the page is meaningless and you will be greatly discommoded when you arrive and find the hotel is sold out.

Computers are meaning machines—and you will notice that our existing Theory of Computation, which derives from Church’s and Turing’s work, has nothing at all to say about meaning.

Cognitive science assumed that brains are computers, more-or-less, and that brains and computers mean things the same way. How? Philosophers of mind assumed that AI guys knew how computers mean things—but we didn’t. We assumed that the philosophers of mind knew—but they didn’t. Once Smith (originally an AI guy) realized this disconnect, he set out to figure out how computers do mean things. Which turns out not to be easy; but he’s still making progress.

On the Origin of Objects is his first major report. One observation central to Meaningness, and to pretty much every work in this reading list, is that objects are not objectively separable. Yet meanings are about objects—Woolloomooloo Wharf, for instance. The objectness of the wharf is not inherent to it, but arises during your interactions with it. On the Origin of Objects includes an account of how. My account will be somewhat different—but Smith is one of the few people to ask the question clearly, and to offer a serious and detailed proposal.

Hofstadter

Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach is a uniquely playful exploration of the philosophy of artificial intelligence. Much of the book is presented in the form of comic dialogs between characters taken from Lewis Carroll. (Plus Terry Winograd, who appears as “Dr. Tony Earwig.”) But it also asks serious and deep questions about the nature of intelligence and computation, and gives insightful answers unlike those proposed by anyone else.

I don’t think Hofstadter’s overall approach was at all right, but all other known AI approaches also look like dead ends to me. If I were forced to choose one to work on, his might be the least unpromising.

I discussed some of Hofstadter’s best ideas in “A first lesson in meta-rationality.”

Psychology

Baumeister

Roy Baumeister’s Meanings of Life is the project most similar to Meaningness in subject matter. It’s an exploration of the ways people think about the same set of topics I cover—purpose, value, self, ethics, sacredness, and so on.

I was annoyed all the way through it, because he says many things I was going to say, which I thought I had thought of first, and which I still haven’t had time to write up.

Mostly, he does not attempt to resolve these problems. Meaningness does. Or will. Any decade now.

Kramer and Alstad

Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad’s The Guru Papers was mis-named. It discusses gurus only in passing.

Their book is a sprawling but brilliant discussion of the major topics of Meaningness—unity and diversity, self and other, sacred and profane, life-purpose, ethics, ultimate value, and so on. It is a memetic nosology—a classification of contagious harmful ideas, attitudes, and practices.

I wrote a brief introduction, plus extensive quotes, here.

Kegan, again

Robert Kegan’s The Evolving Self is the most sophisticated explanation I’ve found of the ways we relate self and other, and the ways we relate to our selves.

The book strikes many readers as a major revelation. It’s not only intellectually fascinating, making sense of so much of our lives—it’s also useful in practice as a guide to radical personal transformation.

Other readers find nothing meaningful in it. Tentatively, I suspect that’s not because they miss the point, but because Kegan’s framework simply doesn’t apply to everyone.

I wrote a detailed summary here.

Ainsle

George Ainsle’s Breakdown of Will is one of the best books I know on what it means to be a self.

Selves are inherently nebulous. They begin as incoherent masses of conflicting impulses. We are functional to the extent that we can get those to agree to head in the same general direction most of the time, and not constantly sabotage each other. Kegan’s book is one account of how to do that. Ainsle’s is another. Their perspectives are extremely different, but—I think—compatible.

Bly

Robert Bly’s A Little Book on the Human Shadow is another outstanding explanation of what it means to have a self. Again, the question is how to resolve internal conflicts. It’s written from an extremely different point of view (Jungian folklore interpretation) than Ainsle’s (mathematical game theory) and Kegan’s (Piagetian developmental psychology).

The Little Book was the basis for my nine-part series on “Eating the Shadow,” which begins here. It was also a major influence on my series on dark culture. Eventually I’ll present the same material quite differently in Meaningness.

Miller

Geoffrey Miller’s Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior explains how vast swathes of everyday activity are unconsciously devoted to advertising our personal qualities to others—rather than enjoying ourselves or making ourselves useful. It’s a fast, fun read, and you will discover things about yourself that are simultaneously horrifying and humorous.

Spent inspired my piece “‘Ethics’ is advertising.”

Csikszentmihalyi

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow: The psychology of optimal experience is a bit dated, and a bit pop, but contains useful insights into enjoyment.

I discussed it in relationship to Vajrayana Buddhism here.

Ethics

Nearly everything that has been written about ethics, whether from a religious or secular rationalist point of view, is eternalistic. That is, it assumes that there must be some correct system of ethics that defines what is morally right. That assumption is mistaken and harmful: there obviously is no such system currently, and there are good reasons to believe there never can be one.

A very few people claim to be ethical nihilists, but they are either trolling or confused.

Only a handful of thinkers have tried to work out non-eternalist, non-nihilist accounts of ethics. The mostly-unwritten ethics chapter of Meaningness will develop this possibility.

So far, my most extensive writing on ethics has been a debunking of the modern Buddhist version. That series of posts does also include positive proposals, summarizing the Meaningness ethical approach, however.

Nietzsche, again

Nietzsche wrote extensively on ethics. In the popular imagination, he was a nihilist and therefore wicked, but in fact he rejected nihilism. His ethical thinking pointed at a complete stance that avoids both ethical eternalism and ethical nihilism.

Among his ethical works, I recommend Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals. Confusingly, there are now many English translations of each. I read the ones by Walter Kaufmann, the only ones available at the time. Both are included in the collection Basic Writings of Nietzsche, a bargain at $3.99 on Kindle. The more recent translations may be better; I don’t know.

Kegan, again again

Robert Kegan’s work began as an extension of Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of moral development. I think Kegan’s stage 5 is the most sophisticated ethical framework available. It requires meta-rationality: relating different ethical systems to each other, and reflecting on their relationship with reality.

Among his several books, only The Evolving Self discusses ethics.

Buckingham

In Finding Our Sea-Legs: Ethics, Experience and the Ocean of Stories, Will Buckingham writes that “we have always been at sea” when it comes to ethics. For thousands of years, philosophers and prophets have proclaimed the possibility of finding land: solid ground. But no one has ever reached any.

It is time, he says, to turn away from that eternalistic fantasy of ethical certainty. Instead, we can make genuine progress in our actual, groundless situation. Metaphorically, we can learn to be better navigators. We can study the winds and the waves and the stars; and can learn to steer around shoals, thunderstorms and whirlpools, guiding our ships into calmer waters where we can gaze at the sea and the sky and watch fish play.

When we recognize that ethics can only ever be a nebulous muddle—but is no less important for that—we can work together to resolve difficulties “with all the kindness, patience, and care that we can muster.” Buckingham concludes that “there is no way out” of the ocean, yet ethics offers “not an intolerable burden” but “the possibility of joy.”

Finding Our Sea-Legs is a fun, easy, sometimes-touching read. I wrote an extended review here.

Society and Politics

Seligman

Adam Seligman, working with other authors, has made major contributions to the understanding of nebulosity, porous boundaries, and meta-rationality, specifically in the political realm.

The two books of his I know are Rethinking Pluralism: Ritual, Experience, and Ambiguity and Ritual and Its Consequences. I reviewed Ritual here.

Foucault

Michel Foucault was the most important philosopher in the lineage of Nietzsche and Heidegger. Unfortunately, his deliberate obscurity has allowed tendentious idiots to misuse his subtle ideas in support of simplistic political agendas.

The best introduction to his work may be Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, by Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow.

Unfortunately, Foucault’s premature death (of AIDS) prevented what might have become a complete meta-rational presentation. His last work—the multi-volume, unfinished History of Sexuality—is the best. It’s only incidentally about sexuality; it’s about self and society, knowledge and power, language and experience.

Lyotard

Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge is one of the two root texts for postmodernism. Knowing this, you might not suspect that it was commissioned by the government of Quebec as a report on the influence of information technology on the exact sciences. Written in 1979, it’s astonishingly prophetic about the then-future impact of the internet—but that is not the reason to read it. You might also not suspect that, unlike the voluminous obscurantist blather of later postmodernists, it’s only 70 pages and reasonably clearly written.

Lyotard’s main topic is the breakdown of the systematic worldview in the face of nebulosity, and the persistence of multiple, functional, partial systems despite that. He aims for “a politics that would respect both the desire for justice [pattern] and the desire for the unknown [nebulosity].” This remains unfulfilled, and obstructed not least by the subsequent development of postmodernism—but I think still a worthy goal.

Hobsbawm

Eric Hobsbawm’s The Invention of Tradition, about fake history, is both insightful and very funny, in a dry and British way. I discussed it here.

  • 1. Because it’s highly condensed, it may be incomprehensible without some knowledge of the tradition. One key to understanding is that “Königsbergian” is a reference to Kant specifically. The supposed “true world” of Nietzsche’s stage 3 is Kant’s ding an sich, “the thing in itself.” That is the inaccessible “noumenon,” or true reality, as opposed to the defective “phenomenon” that appears to the senses. This is a catastrophically bad idea, which leads straight to nihilism.
  • 2. There are several books that claim to explain the Beacon. I haven’t read any of them all the way through, but I've skimmed the ones I could find, and I would not recommend any of them. They miss the point, as far as I could tell.
  • 3. Ixtlan, maybe.

Appendix: Terminological choices

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

This page will present a brief explanation for this appendix. In short, it explains why I chose particular words to use as unusual technical terms.

Terminology: Complete

Tern amidst clouds, symbolizing Dzogchen

I use the word “complete” to describe stances that allow nebulosity.

These stances are “complete” in that they don’t deny the existence of any dimension of meaningness.

The term “complete” is not ideal. An earlier version of this book used “non-dual”; but that word is taken to mean something else.

I chose “complete” partly because it echoes the Tibetan word Dzogchen. Dzogchen is the branch of Buddhism that most influenced this book. “Dzogchen” means “utterly complete.”

Terminology: Emptiness and form, nebulosity and pattern

Emptiness

Nebulosity and pattern are key concepts in this book. They are closely related to the Buddhist notions of emptiness and form. For several reasons, I've chosen not to use “emptiness” and “form,” and invented these new terms instead.

First, “emptiness” in English has a common usage with regard to meaningness: it is the feeling of alienation that comes with rejecting it. Emptiness in this sense is an emotional correlate of nihilism, or the perception of meaninglessness. “Emptiness” in Buddhist philosophy means something different. Worse, what it means is related to the Western use, but in a complex way. Talking about Buddhist emptiness in a non-Buddhist context seems bound to cause confusion.

Second, the Buddhist philosophy of emptiness and form is famously contentious. Various Buddhist schools each have their own explanations, and vitriolically attack each others’ interpretations. I don’t want to take sides in these battles. I also don’t want to argue about whether my own understanding or explanation of emptiness and form is correct (according to the standards of some Buddhist school or other).

Third, the philosophy of emptiness and form is also famously obscure. It is so abstract and vague that it is hard to know whether the divergent interpretations are actually discussing the same thing, or if they talk past one another because they discuss different topics. It is hard to know whether any of the writers in the field are talking about anything at all, or whether they are discussing something purely imaginary. It is hard to know how one could know which of the accounts is right, or even what it would mean for them to be right or wrong.1

As a result, it is unclear whether “nebulosity and pattern,” as I use the words here, are the same thing as someone’s version of “emptiness and form,” or not. My concepts are influenced particularly by the Aro gTér explanations of emptiness and form; but I am uncertain whether they are identical.

I think that it is probably possible to give completely clear and precise explanations of “nebulosity” and “pattern.”2 This might be useful to the philosophy of emptiness and form. Even for someone who believes “nebulosity and pattern” are different from emptiness and form, they are sufficiently similar that a clear account of one might clarify the other. It might at minimum serve as a challenge to Buddhist philosophers to formulate a comparably clear account.

But I am not going to do that in this book. This book is meant for a general readership, for whom a lengthy discussion of exactly what “nebulosity” and “pattern” mean would be a distraction. (Never mind a discussion of how they relate to the various Buddhist theories of emptiness—interesting as that might be to some.)

I have a sketch of another book on that subject. If only I could write everything at once…

  • 1. As it happens, I do have opinions about these questions. I may present them somewhere, someday; but I’m unsure that it would be useful. In any case, it’s a topic that doesn’t belong on this web site.
  • 2. Clear and precise enough for analytic philosophy. Some math would be required—enough to impress analytic philosophers.

Terminology: Non-dual

One vase?  Or two faces?

One vase? Or two faces?

The essence of this book is a method for resolving opposing pairs of confusions about meaningness. I would like to call these resolutions “non-dual.” Unfortunately, that word is taken to mean something else. This has already caused much confusion elsewhere.

This book’s method draws on the Buddhist analysis of eternalism and nihilism. Buddhism often describes the resolution of this opposition as “non-duality.”

A quick Google search shows that, in current English, “non-duality” is almost always used to mean something different. Mostly, “non-dual” refers to monism: the doctrine that All is One, and all distinctions are ultimately illusory.

Monism forms a false opposition with dualism: the doctrine that subjects and objects are definitely, objectively separated. In this book, I argue that monism is wrong, and that the main reason people adopt it is because it appears that dualism is the only alternative.

Using “non-dualism” to mean “monism” actively hides other possibilities.

Potentially there may be many different alternatives to dualism, of which monism is only one. (This book advocates another.) It would be useful if all such alternatives could be described as “non-dualistic.” It is probably too late for that; “non-dual” is well-established as meaning “monist.”

“Non-dual” appears to have entered the English language as a direct translation of the Sanskrit word advaita,1 as used in Hindu philosophy. Hindu advaita is monist; it asserts that all beings are One with the Supreme Cosmic Spirit.

Buddhist “non-duality,” and the stances I advocate in this book, are not monist; they reject both twoness and oneness.2 Individuals cannot be objectively separated, but neither are they identical (with each other, or with some sort of Cosmic Something). These stances are“non-dualist/non-monist.”

There has already been extensive confusion on this point. The Buddhist view has often been misunderstood as monist in the West. Often the Buddhist and Hindu “non-dualities” are mixed up. Using “non-duality” to mean “monism” has probably contributed to this confusion.3

  • 1. A- means “not,” as in “atheist”; dva is “two,” cognate with “dual”; -ita is “-ity.” Sometimes the close historical relationship between Indian and European languages is obvious.
  • 2. There may or may not be a difference between Buddhist non-duality and the stances I advocate. Buddhist philosophy is sufficiently complex and obscure that it is hard to say for certain.
  • 3. I suspect that this confusion is partly deliberate. “Perennialism” is the evangelical strategy of describing all religions as distorted misunderstandings of monism. Advocates of monism often insist that Buddhist non-dual philosophy is actually monist, and essentially the same as Hindu advaita, but gets some details wrong. Buddhists reply that it is not monist, and that these “details” are its central point.